free software midi sequencers?

can anyone recommend anything? most of my sequencing software is more geared towards non-realtime composition, which kinda makes playing live a bit stale. i'm looking for something that can loop a pattern or sequence, that i can tweak while it's playing, and that preferably can also sequence midi CC events, though this isn't mandatory.

basically i'm using it to control a qy70 and an electribe es-1, and maybe a couple of other things in the future. the qy70's sequencer isn't good for live playing, and the electribe's sequencer is great but can't sequence anything but itself.

and i'm going to be using it on a netbook, so would like something quite lightweight and simple, maybe a step sequencer? i've given up looking for hardware sequencers, since everything i've tried seems to have some kind of crippling limitation that prevents me from using it optimally in a live situation.

any suggestions?

edit: PC software please!

Perhaps seq24 http://www.filter24.org/seq24/

Not sure how good it is for live tweaking though.

yeah if they would just have added one button part mutes to the qy70 it would be infinitely more jammable. maybe someone should do 3rd party os for it...

  On 2/28/2011 at 5:55 AM, analogue wings said:

yeah if they would just have added one button part mutes to the qy70 it would be infinitely more jammable. maybe someone should do 3rd party os for it...

a third party os would be amazing! something with an up front tr-style step sequencer. i wonder if it's possible?

  On 2/28/2011 at 5:51 AM, EleminoP said:

Perhaps seq24 http://www.filter24.org/seq24/

 

Not sure how good it is for live tweaking though.

cool, will check it out! seems nice and minimal.

well it's possible - they did it for the MPC. easy is a whole nother thing tho. unless yamaha released the source you would have to reverse engineer the existing OS which would take a LOT of time and patience

  On 2/28/2011 at 5:51 AM, EleminoP said:

Perhaps seq24 http://www.filter24.org/seq24/

 

Not sure how good it is for live tweaking though.

actually, from opening it up and looking at the help file, this seems fucking perfect! it's basically what i used to do with ableton and audio loops, except with midi. gonna have a play with it and see how it goes in a live environment.

Why Reaper dear boy - http://reaper.fm/ (with its likkle 4.9Mb installer)

  On 2/28/2011 at 1:24 PM, mcbpete said:

Why Reaper dear boy - http://reaper.fm/ (with its likkle 4.9Mb installer)

yeah, i use reaper for all of my multitracking, and i used it to sequence my midi gear at a recent gig.. but i find its workflow isn't quite what i want in terms of playing live and improvising with sequences. it's an awesome multitrack recording program, but it just isn't designed for live playing imo.

Damn, really ? I think that's probably the one thing that's letting it down from being a key competitor against the bigger DAWs then ....

I'm using Reaper for my recording and live performances these days. But I don't do much live sequencing in it, I use it a VST mothership for increasingly challenging looping with Circular Labs Mobius and out to hardware loopers. Seems like the most logical way to actually perform in my opinion.

Reaper is more efficient, intuitive and versatile that most if not all other DAWs as far as I can tell.

Anyway devices you feel give you the most control to perform are up to personal preference though.

i guess reaper isn't really spontaneous enough for what i want - editing midi sequences while playing is a bit annoying, and moving the cursor without changing the song position is pretty difficult.

seq24 looks and feels perfect though, i'll give it a proper try tomorrownight, it's very lightweight and i love the fact that it's basically a midi sequence version of a loopstation, except the loops can be of different lengths, and can be turned on and off individually!

Nice on the seq24 I will check it out. I forgot to mention that I was looking into doing live sequencing with Reaper like 7 months ago and figured out how to customize cursor settings and a bunch of other shit to have it really smartly configured for live sequencing.

Reaper lets you customize just about every facet of its tits and clit.

care to post how you do it? i'm interested! especially since my way of including breakbeats in my live setup is to pitch them to the tempo of the track and chuck them in my es-1, not the most efficient way of synchronising breakbeats. if i could get reaper working nicely for live stuff i could use a tempo synced looper vst with everything else going through hardware.

Yeah, I will look back into exactly how I did it tomorrow. Might be able to save my preset settings and send them to you.

holy crap, seq24 is almost perfect. the only thing i don't like about it is that spacebar doesn't trigger start/stop. that said though, once i start it i'm not gonna stop it.

i fucking love how the sequences are mapped to keyboard keys! it's going to make playing live so much fun. i'm working on a live set right now, and even with super minimal elements, i'm giggling like a schoolgirl at being able to mute and unmute individual parts using keypresses!

Sorry I haven't made a tutorial for Reaper live customization but I pretty much would have to go back and look at forums just as much as you would. You can assign any function or !functions! to any key on yur keyboard in Reaper. Keep going with Seq24 if it does everything you want it to but I would not be surprised you liked Reaper more if you spent some time learning how to customize it any way you want.

but shit here ya go if you wanna give Reaper another spin for this

Reaper:Custom key commands

editing the cursor functionality is in the options>preferences>editing behavior. You basically make it so that the cursor only moves the playback location if you click up on the ruler. You are free to edit and move things around. You deselect automatically move view with playback in the options there for you can start new sequences and edit them while the playback is somewhere else in the project. you can turn on smooth seeking so that you can program loop sections with markers and switch between them with 1,2,3,4 etc. marker selection on keyboard and it will switch sections at the end of the last marker point.

Reaper really is insanely customizable. You kinda have to just look into the options settings and some googling and you can make it do just about anything you want it to.

Click Removes Timeline Selection/Loop Selection and other other editing enhancements

  Quote

Link playback cursor only to start of loop selection is another very essential preference needed for effortless audio editing work flow: