Sequential Circuits Inc. Customer Relations Representatives ad, Keyboard 1984

Sequential Circuits Inc. Customer Relations Representatives 1/4-page advertisement from page 75 in Keyboard Magazine December 1984.

In building upon last year's Sequential Circuits' "Happy Holiday Season" ad that I posted around this time last year, I thought I would also post this other 1/4-page ad that appeared 10 pages earlier is the same December 1984 issue. Sequential wasn't just spoiling Keyboard readers with their kindness in a holiday ad, they had also hired two full time customer service reps to directly spoil any musician who's MIDI systems included SCI instruments.

Nice!

As far as I'm concerned, Sequential was at the top of their game at this time. Not only did they have these two ads peppered about in the back half of this jam-packed 108-page issue, but also had many other promos in the magazine including:

• a one page color ad featuring their Prophet-T8, Six-Trak, Prophet-600 and Drumtraks.
• an attached sound sheet that included "Sequential's newest product" on side-two. Unfortunately, my copy of the mag didn't include the sound sheet so I can't tell you what product that was for sure (my guess is the T8). But, according to the delicious cover of the magazine (more on that later), side-one looks like it was a recording by the awesome Wendy Carlos.
• a two-page centerfold spread made up of a full-page color ad for the SixTrak AND a full-page color ad for the DrumTraks.

With all those ads, SCI was definitely the heavy-weight in this magazine, droppin' more hamiltons on ad-space than Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg do in Saturday Night Live's digital short "Lazy Sunday". 

And it was a good issue to be the heavy-weight in. On the cover is a classic photo of Dave Stewart of Eurythmics posing in a top hat above a red SH-101, and on the first page of the interview article, Dave is again posing, top hat off, mouth open and apparently getting ready to take a bit out of a Casiotone MT-41.

Both photos include Dave Stewart's portable studio, just one of the many topics the article covers. Even if you tossed out all the various photos and ads strewn about the article, you still get a good five solid pages of text on the musician and the band.  '*This* is what Keyboard was all about for me.

None of that Men's Health crap where you get a photo of Ashton Kutcher on the cover, and yet can only find about three quarters of a page of content on the guy. Maybe there was more, but I couldn't even easily find the table of contents to check. So many of the pages in that mag have replaced actual content with lazy info-graphics, its hard to flip through the mag quickly and make out what giant numbers might actually be a table of contents, and what might only be just some big number indicating "the number of times more bacteria found inside a bachelor pad than in a single woman's appartment" (the number is a big giant14 btw - eeeeeew!).

Just another sign that we truly live in an ADD-world.

And with that - the holidays begin. Thinking of taking a week or two off blogging like I did last year. Not sure yet. We'll see how the weekend goes.  :)

Happy holidays everyone!