In 1996 my rig consisted of a TG77 controlled by an S-50. I was getting pretty sick of the sounds, and wanted one keyboard that I could throw under my arm and take to a gig. The original QuadraSynth was a bit of a critical failure, and I think that explains why this keyboard came and went pretty much unnoticed. But Alesis had learned from their mistakes and came back with good, solid, crisp sounds, 76-note keyboard, 8MB of piano, and 64-note polyphony in a package weighing less than 35 pounds.

To its credit and my shame, I was carrying this in a gig bag with a broken zipper when it slipped out like a weiner out of a bun and bounced down an entire flight of (carpeted) stairs. It still works fine. If you look closely you can see that the top key is a little out of alignment.

As far as embarassing gear moments, the experience of telling the rubber-necking crack-addicted family peeking their heads out of the downstairs apartment that everything was fine is second only to the time that I dropped Ted Davidson’s SY77 off an un-tightened A-frame stand during sound check at a gig in Oshawa.

The SY77 was fine too.