From about 1984 to 1986, a company called Sequential Circuits made a little known synthesizer with a built-in keyboard called the MAX. This was a scaled down version of the Six-Trak. It has 6-voice polyphony and a sequencer for each voice essentially. The MAX was intented to be used as a peripheral to a computer based home studio which essentially wouldn't exist for many years after the MAX was produced. The full features of this instrument could not be realized without the a Commodore computer and the Model 920 software designed for the MAX. Hence why it never caught on as a viable instrument. The sound library is actually fully editable from a computer but without it, or at least a Prophet-T8, you're stuck with the 80 onboard sounds which are not very impressive. Now, once a patch has been edited, it can be stored in the blank part of the bank consuming numbers 80-99 on the keyboard assuming the storage battery is good. If not, it will need to be changed. To cut to the chase, it took me (the owner of this website) several months to find a piece of software for Windows 95, 98 and XP that was compatable with the MAX and was easy to use. So the whole point of this little page is to make it available to the general public. This is freeware and was actually designed for the Six-Trak but is respectively compatable with the MAX. It will take some playing to get it to work perfectly of course like most software but it's well worth it.
Free patch editor software for the Six-Trak and MAX
For more information on the MAX or other Sequential keyboards, please go to the guy that helped me imensely with this undertaking. NoteIt's World of MIDI or The Vintage Synth Explorer is a good source also for general information. Oh and while you're at it, check out some of the new stuff created by the same creator as much of Sequential's technology David Smith Instruments.
Factory default patches, plus a few of my own experiments.
