so, uhhh.....

since my synth has no onboard sequencer and i've got some money now again, can somebody

recommend me a hardware sequencer? i don't really know what to look for in a sequencer, never had one. so please tell me your sequencer of choice, why you chose it, what to look for, what to avoid..

anything will come in handy!

what synth?

it depends on how you sequence i think. for me, i do a lot of pencilling and step-editing (ie. NOT playing stuff in with a keyboard), so the options are more limited. i have used my mpc1000 for this task, and it's pretty good at it. if you tend to play shit in, you have a lot more options i think.

  Ascdi said:

it depends on how you sequence i think. for me, i do a lot of pencilling and step-editing (ie. NOT playing stuff in with a keyboard), so the options are more limited. i have used my mpc1000 for this task, and it's pretty good at it. if you tend to play shit in, you have a lot more options i think.

i have heard many good things about this -

but i have not used one myself.

the Doepfer one is pretty similar and a little cheaper.

if this out of your price range i'd recommend something like a korg electribe or a Roland Dr-5 . They have shitty built in sounds but for $200-400 they make great midi sequencers. The elctribe is more for real-time, live, and improvised stuff. The Dr-5 doesnt have a laid out 16-step sequencer its just real-time record mode but it has great chord building features.

p3 isn't made anymore. it's still available as a kit AFAIK...

  kokoon said:

p3 isn't made anymore. it's still available as a kit AFAIK...

you're right the p3 isnt but a new more improved version is coming out in jan 2007

If it's MIDI, then Roland MC-500MkII. :heart:

I love mine.

mpc 500 no dobt

My entire experience with hardware sequencing can be summed up by saying: "This is the sort of thing they made computers for".

an analogue sequencer isn't usually meant for sequencing an entire song - they'd normally sync up with a main sequencer, or with other modular sequencers, and play one or two parts...

definetly the Yamaha QY700 - it's like a soundtracker in a small black box... it's what squarepusher and arovane sequence everything on - very quick and easy to use - lots of depth too with edits and quantizes which put Cubase to shame

  ten fingers ten toes said:

My entire experience with hardware sequencing can be summed up by saying: "This is the sort of thing they made computers for".

my entire experience with you can be summed up by saying: "this is the sort of thing cyanide, mallets and assplugs were made for."

  Prof. Winston P.Caullier said:

my entire experience with you can be summed up by saying: "this is the sort of thing cyanide, mallets and assplugs were made for."

Always nice to get the genuine intellectual discourse from the good prof.

  ten fingers ten toes said:

My entire experience with hardware sequencing can be summed up by saying: "This is the sort of thing they made computers for".

i agree; just sequence it via midi

why would you want a hardware sequencer when things like laptops and Cubase exist? I'm honestly asking.

Well, if you have alot of CV gear, or you want something with a specific groove (like the 303), these limited applications make some sort of sense when considering hardware sequencing. If you just want to eject cock contents all over your Microkorg, there's absolutely no reason other than you saw an issue of Future Music Magazine that said RDJ totaly uses a hacksaw rigged to a DIN <-> CV <-> TOSLINK <-> APPLETALK <-> MIDI OUT port, in real time. With his balls.

a h/w sequencer is generally a custom designed computer running a very stripped down OS, which doesn't crash, with rock-solid MIDI timing (something no computer has), a custom control surface made for programming, editing and sequencing, zero loading & saving times, and often far superior sequencing and editing capabilities...

by contrast, computers are really horrible when it comes to making music - sloppy MIDI timing, a tonne of clocks which interfere with the convertors, giving you unheard of levels of jitter and background noise, they tend to crash and destroy work at the worst possible moments, they run an incredibly inappropriate operating system for audio which requires lots of work arounds in code, like unacceptably low control rates and cheap sounding up/downsampling algorithms which you'd never find in a proper sampler, they often require a lot of mouse clicking and computers themselves are creative vortexes...

if you take most of the worthwhile electronic music which has surfaced over the last 20 years or so, very little of it is computer sequenced... look at the warp roster - about 50% of them use h/w sequencers - why do you think the ratio's so high? look at hiphop, house or techno, esp in the US and places like Berlin, it's 90% h/w sequenced... electronic music? Prefuse, Squarepusher, Arovane, Ken Ishii, Aphex Twin, BOC, Autechre (on and off), Stewart Walker, Juan Atkins, etc.

a sequencer like this:

is far more suited to electronic music than anything you'll find in s/w... it's a much more professional tool all round - renoise is the only reason i'm still using a laptop - it's so similar to the QY700 - it feels like a h/w sequencer... the QY is still better to work with, and more powerful as a MIDI sequencer, but if it weren't for a few useful plug-ins and a £2,000 soundcard, i'd make the switch tomorrow

computers are still very weak for sample playback, so if you want quality and good MIDI timing then what use is a computer?

a big psychological thing with sequencers too - i set a challenge about 6 months ago on the world's biggest production forum: find me one decent piece of electronic music made in fruity loops

still no one's even put anything forward... i don't mean vaguely competant - i mean something which can stand along side the greats

there's hundred of thousands of kids using floops - there's only a few thousand QY700's in existance - think about that

So I guess Luke Vibert's Amiga and PC (running Reason!!!!) don't count? Give me a fucking break that took me two seconds to think of.

Most of the music of the past 20 years has been sequenced by dedicated hardware, because for most of that time PC's would struggle to display color let alone process anything meaningful.

You don't quantify any of the bullshit you spout out there. Please, prove to me how horrible the MIDI timing is on a modern PC. Give me meaningful data culled from someplace other than your asshole.

here's your information -

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar01/arti.../pcmusician.asp

Clocks And Jitter

Audio Clicks

Internal And Display Resolution

The MIDI Bottleneck

MIDI Timing Problems

MIDI Timing Jitter

MIDI And Audio Drift

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar00/articles/miditime.htm

Although MIDI + Audio sequencing packages on both Mac and PC are becoming ever more powerful, 'the timing was tighter on my Atari' is still a common complaint.

Simon V's sampler aliasing comparisson

http://www.simonv.com/tutorials/quality.php

you do realise who i am? i was head mastering engineer at Fusion for 5 years and i currently run and own Phase Studios N.London division who master for most of europe & asia's biggest electronic labels, as well as MTV and half a dozen other digital music channels... i contribute to magazines like Sound on Sound and Music Tech regularly, i've helped develop various sound and video processing app's - including the DVfilm range and many plug-ins in the latest Jitter collection

i also back everything i say up with as much information as is asked for...

name 2 other significant electronic music producers who use Reason...

what it comes down to is, it's art, and you don't need a rational justification for how you choose to make it.

You fucking moron, those articles are from half a decade ago or more.

Do you realize what has happened to home computing in the past 5 years? Quite a lot!

And gee, isn't that Simon V's sampler comparison, the one that scores Renoise "perfect"? Wait, I thought that hopelessly under classed PCs were using pathetic algorithms ???

And all the rubbish about who you are is the same tired old trolling crap you always try and pull Paulie Swift Nuts.

  ten fingers ten toes said:

You fucking moron, those articles are from half a decade ago or more.

 

Do you realize what has happened to home computing in the past 5 years? Quite a lot!

this is quite tedious... i posted them because they happened to be very good articles on the subject... little has changed in 5 years - everyone uses the same midi interfaces, runs the same codecs and runs into the same problems - it's nothing to do with CPU clock speed or bandwidth, the ST had better midi timing at 16-bits 8mhz - it's to do with the way PC's and Macs deal with hardware devices, in kernal mode, etc.

here's some from 2004 http://www.jay.fm/miditime/

from a logic developer (also 2004) http://logic-users.org/forums/LUG/163408

Note that due to midi timing jitter, varying response time and jitter

between midi devices, and the (unfortunately) tempo-dependent

environment/arrange delay parameters, it's unlikely you'll ever get

reliably perfect sync for external midi devices.

2005 pro sound web

http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php...2/0/#msg_164322

What happened this time. i battled with poor midi timing, poor midi recording, and finally got it sorta usable, just to find that its still not so great with cubase sx 2.2.. Working on todd's project on his dual cpu machine we edited every bass note, and ever drum track slicing up like 20 to 40 thousand notes make that many events. the system slows to a crawl, the detect silence is a joke, the delete over laps option is buggy and kills events over 600 or something, if you try to bounce down multple tracks at once, it takes a million years, the interface becomes sluggish and un responsive, there is no iterative quantising for audio so you have to manually make a midi track and insert a midi note at every slice to create a custom groove track, then you can quantise that midi track iteratively before you make the groove, then you can quantise the audio to that custom groove track. but it made what should of taken about two weeks of editing is taking almost 4 months thanks to good ol steinberg, their bugs, slow interface and lack of features...

2006 logic

http://www.opuslocus.com/logic/record_offset.php

For all the claims of “sample accuracy”, earlier versions of Logic are not in general a very accurate solution for recording overdubs, and software-monitoring realtime audio input or realtime softsynth play will always involve some latency.

re: aliasing

??? that's why i use Renoise... it still aliases it's got very good playback filtering... if you're not using Renoise you've got problems - floops' biggest problem is that the rendered output doesn't match the monitor

anyway, 2 other electronic music producers that use Reason please...

Ok, now prove that hardware devices are more accurate and completely free of any jitter. That the MIDI timing quirks aren't simply a combination of dodgy devices, protocol, and wiring, etc.

Not to mention, you went from SOS articles to a bunch of tards whining on a forum, but whatever

can't we all just love one another.

use whatever is comfortable and gets your thoughts out quickest, sacrifice quality / precision if necessary. if you end up on something very dirty and inaccurate then learn to incorporate that filth into your creative palette.

renoise is hot btw

  ten fingers ten toes said:

Ok, now prove that hardware devices are more accurate and completely free of any jitter. That the MIDI timing quirks aren't simply a combination of dodgy devices, protocol, and wiring, etc.

 

Not to mention, you went from SOS articles to a bunch of tards whining on a forum, but whatever

well unfortunately they don't rewrite articles on midi timing jitter every 2 years - and 2 of those articles i just posted were from offical resources, one was from a logic developer and one was from a well respected engineer... hardly tards

here's an SOS review of the QY700

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1996_artic...amahaqy700.html

"Software companies like Steinberg and Emagic have spent tens of thousands of man-hours creating sequencing packages which allow you to edit MIDI data (and latterly, digital audio) on large monitor screens in half a dozen ways, with all sorts of cycle modes for recording and overdubbing. Few people, it seems, notice the timing problems which can occur when using mass-market computers designed for DTP and business software for a timing-critical operation like replaying large amounts of MIDI data, especially with operating systems that prioritise screen redraws and system calls over the transmission of MIDI events. Occasionally, a courageous software programmer breaks cover to admit the problem (usually on the Internet, which his lords and masters haven't learned to use yet)"

"Now it may be that these very features are what place the extra burden on computer-based systems. I have noticed that the playback timing of several Mac and PC sequencers goes awry when the screen needs constant redraws or re-listings. It may be that Yamaha found that the timing of the QY700 was affected by such features and wisely chose to omit them. Or it may just be that because a hardware sequencer has never had a moving 'now' line before, they didn't put one on the QY700 (although it seems odd to have taken so much other inspiration from software-based machines and not to have borrowed that concept as well).

Whatever the reason behind this omission, I think it will cause most people with any experience of '90s computer-based sequencer packages to baulk at the first fence. It is so much a part of modern sequencing that even I (who managed without it for so long) found myself disorientated for a while. It may be true that you don't miss what you have never had, but it is also the case that once you have grown used to a feature it is dashed difficult to manage without it.

So how good is the QY700's timing? The answer, you'll be pleased to hear, is 'too good for these ears to fault!' Whilst I would not claim to have the most sensitive ears to timing problems, I can certainly hear a difference between the solidity of the QY700 and that of most sequencing packages on the market. In fact, there was only one moment in the whole time I spent with the QY700 where I noticed something flaky, and that was a Phil Collins-style drum fill in one of the demo sequences provided on disk. On investigation, this turned out to be human frailty because it was programmed like this. In fact, the QY700's 1/480th of a quarter-note resolution had perfectly captured the inexactness of the original playing, and I was easily able to tighten this up with the Quantisation Strength parameter (see later)."

you have to understand 2 things...

1) it's not difficult to design a h/w sequencer with solid MIDI timing - it's completely unacceptable if it's anything less... the reason a computer is sloppy has been covered in most of the articles i posted: emulated midi ports, kernal mode, device jitter, device latency, windows device handling, etc.

2) everything i say about audio is unquestionably right... i own a 5 bedroom appartment in n.london, a large house in the home counties and run three cars, i pay for this 100% with my knowledge of this very subject

LOL an article from 1996...

You're such a fucking joke it's just great to get a laugh.

BTW, you do need somewhat of a rational justification analogue wings... for instance, my dog would not be of much use as a midi sequencer.....