back to the future

I found this blighter when I was tidying out a cupboard the other day. It's a funny thing to find in a cupboard I hear you say but I think it's only in Ireland that we call a cupboard, a press. Anyhow for those of you who are caught up in the fidgety software of today it will mean nothing. For those of you who remeber the golden age of MIDI this is one of the crown jewels. It's a Yamaha QY10. These little fellas were first released in 1990 and they were the first portable music workstation. It's about the size of a VHS cassette (a what??? you say.) and you can plug headphones into it. My old chum Naphta gave it to me about 5 years back but I never got round to figuring out how to work it. The only instructions he got for it were in Japanese so they weren't much use. Thankfully I downloaded a manual for it so I'm going to get busy with it. Expect some David Kitt style lo-fi experiments from me in the near future. The future is so bright I'd better get my shades.