Some years ago, enough that I can’t quite remember the exact number, I found myself at Steve’s Music in Toronto noodling around on the newest cool thing, a multi-timbral synth from the folks who brought us the Prophet-5 (so favoured of Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, and pretty much anyone else who had five grand to drop on a polyphonic synth in the late seventies) and its more affordable little brother the Pro-One (I have one of each and you don’t, ha ha ha) called the Six-Trak. MIDI was a big effin’ thing when this four-octave number hit the shelves, and add to that a built-in loop sequencer and the almost-unheard-of ability to play more than one different sound at once, and you’ve got a pretty happening little synth on your hands. Until, of course, you notice that it’s got only one oscillator per voice, and the one voice on the inside of your head starts making tsk tsk noises and saying “thin, thin, thin” – but then you say to the little voice “what about stack mode, in which you can layer six different individually programmed oscillators on top of each other” at which point the little voice in your head says “hmph” and tries to pretend that it’s more interested in rearranging the flowers in that vase over there than playing with your new synthesizer. But you’ve got yourself a new Six-Trak, and it’s cute as a lost golfball and cheap as chips and there it is on the harvest table by the window over there. And anyway there I was recording a multi-timbral loop sequence, and gathering a small crowd at my elbows, and not caring whether it was me or the new synth from Sequential that was a pretty effin’ cool thing going on at Steve’s Music on a Saturday afternoon in, jeez, could it have been like 1984.