Voyetra Sequencer Plus on IBM PC XT

Not my music! But this really shows Voyetra Sequencer Plus

These days you can do more with an iphone, but in 1984 Voyetra Sequencer Plus rocked the music world as the first professional MIDI sequencer available for DOS. Back in those days, floppy disks were really floppy. On my IMB PC XT, with its two floppy disks (no hard disk) probably 128K of ram, if that, it actually did a great job. I had it hooked into my FBO1's and Roland 707. Suddenly, I commanded midi control central.

The joy of this software was its simplicity, and the clip above does a good job at showing the screens and interface. It was basic, but some ideas haven't been bettered, like the now standard MIDI "player piano scroll" note view, already there 25 ago. There were no windows, you had a few full screens to go to, but everything was right there in front of you, the way I still like it, as in Abelton Live, which I use today. Stacks and stacks of windows are bothersome and get in the way of your creative flow.

I bought the used XT from a co-worker who was upgrading for $375 with a monitor and everything. He accepted an installment plan of $125 a month. It was actually 1987 when I got this setup going. And I used it for some time, until I graduated to a Mac 2ci and Steinberg Cubase.

My XT/Voyetra setup grew. In the end it fed midi to an 8-way midi-splitter connected to my 2 Yamaha FB01s (4 audio outs), a Yamaha TX16W sampler (10 outs). My drum boxes were the Roland TR707 (8? outs) and an Alesis SR16 (4 outs) and I also got good drum sounds from the AKAI XE8 (even more outs). I ended up with quite a few audio tracks that I could individually control. They all lead to a 16 channel Boss mixer, n0t even enough channels to handle the load. The simplicity afforded by a visual interface was complicated down the line by the enormous amount of audio it could trigger. The awesome tangle of wires, I grew to hate, while the Voyetra Sequencer Plus I have fond memories of. It plain-old-fashioned-simple WORKED.

And it didn't give me CPU overload messages!

The computer is still sitting in my mother-in-law's attic. I wonder if I can get it running again?