Unbelievable! I went back to the store today where I recently purchased my Roland W-30 and Kawai K4r. I noticed in the junk area was a mint condition Kawai Q-80 which in my opinion is a great little sequencer. The price was $10 which included the Kawai Q-80, manual, and adapter. I went up to the counter to buy it and the guy told me he had another one he would give me since I was interested in the device. He told me I was a frequent customer so he would allow me to buy both for $5 each.

The Q-80 is a 32-track sequencer with 26,000-note capacity and a built-in 3.5″ disk drive. Extensive and complete editing, real-time and step recording and quantizing with up to 10 songs. A new “motif” function allows up to 100 stored musical phrases or “motifs” for use or insertion into a song at any time. The Q-80 works well in the studio and for live performances. The Q-80 can also store MIDI system exclusive data to disk from other synths. (1988)

Also the 32 tracks all have their own mute buttons (8 buttons across and 4 rows to toggle through). The beauty is that each track can be any length so no copying short sections out against other longer ones. Plus it holds 10 songs worth of tracks in memory when you power it off and it has a floppy drive for backup which doesn’t need to be used in order to run the sequencer.

With both units, the floppy drives work fantastic. Both sequencers were in mint condition without any sign of wear. Plus I got adapters for both along with manuals. The LCDs were in pristine condition and everything worked just great. Will I use these extensively? We’ll see, but with the price at $5 bucks each, I just couldn’t pass them up.