Music sequencer
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control, and possibly audio and automation data for digital audio workstations and plug-ins.
Overview
Modern sequencers
The advent of Musical Instrument Digital Interface in the 1980s gave programmers the opportunity to design software that could more easily record and play back sequences of notes played or programmed by a musician. As the technology matured, sequencers gained more features, such as the ability to record multitrack audio. Sequencers used for audio recording are called digital audio workstations.Many modern sequencers can be used to control virtual instruments implemented as software plug-ins. This allows musicians to replace expensive and cumbersome standalone synthesizers with their software equivalents.
Today the term sequencer is often used to describe software. However, hardware sequencers still exist. Workstation keyboards have their own proprietary built-in MIDI sequencers. Drum machines and some older synthesizers have their own step sequencer built in. The market demand for standalone hardware MIDI sequencers has diminished greatly due to the greater feature set of their software counterparts.
Types of music sequencer
Music sequencers can be categorized by handling data types, such as:- MIDI data for MIDI sequencers
- CV/Gate data for analog sequencers
- Automation data for mixing-automation in DAWs, and software effect or instrument plug-ins for DAWs with sequencing features
- Audio data in audio sequencers including DAWs, loop-based music software, etc.; or phrase samplers including grooveboxes, etc.
Analog sequencer
s are typically implemented with analog electronics, and play the musical notes designated by a series of knobs or sliders for adjusting the note corresponding to each step in the sequence. It is designed for both composition and live performance; users can change the musical notes at any time without regard to recording mode. The time interval between each musical note may be independently adjustable. Typically, analog sequencers are used to generate repeated minimalistic phrases which may be reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder or trance music.(step recording mode)
On step sequencers, musical notes are rounded into steps of equal time intervals, and users can enter each musical note without exact timing; Instead, the timing and duration of each step can be designated in several different ways:
- On the drum machines: select a trigger timing from a row of step-buttons.
- On the bass machines: select a step note from a chromatic keypad, then select a step duration from a group of length-buttons, sequentially.
- On the several home keyboards: in addition to the real-time sequencer, a pair of step trigger buttons is provided; using it, notes on the pre-recorded sequence can be triggered in arbitrary timings for the timing dedicated recordings or performances.
Realtime sequencer (realtime recording mode)
Realtime sequencers record the musical notes in real-time as on audio recorders, and play back musical notes with designated tempo, quantizations, and pitch. For editing, often punch in/out features originating in tape recording workflows are provided. This mode is widely supported on software sequencers, DAWs, and built-in hardware sequencers.Software sequencer
A software sequencer is application software providing a functionality of a music sequencer, and often provided as one feature of the DAW or the integrated music authoring environments. The user may control the software sequencer either by using the graphical user interfaces or a specialized input devices, such as a MIDI controller.Audio sequencer
Alternative subsets of audio sequencers include:| Image:Ardour-screenshot-big.jpg|left|120px|A typica DAW |
| Image:Cubase6 LoopMash 2 loop remixer.jpg|left|120px|A typical loop-based music software |
| Image:Milkytracker Instrument.jpg|left|120px|A typical Tracker software |
| Image:Akai MPC60.jpg|left|120px|A typical groovebox providing sampler and sequencer |
| Image:Cubase6 Sample Editor beat slicing.jpg|left|120px|A typical beat slicer |
History
Early sequencers
The early music sequencers were sound-producing devices such as automatic musical instruments, music boxes, mechanical organs, player pianos, and Orchestrions. Player pianos, for example, had much in common with contemporary sequencers. Composers or arrangers transmitted music to piano rolls which were subsequently edited by technicians who prepared the rolls for mass duplication. Eventually consumers were able to purchase these rolls and play them back on their own player pianos.The origin of automatic musical instruments seems remarkably old. As early as the 9th century, the Persian Banū Mūsā brothers invented a hydropowered organ using exchangeable cylinders with pins, and also an automatic flute-playing machine using steam power, as described in their Book of Ingenious Devices. The Banu Musa brothers' automatic flute player was the first programmable music sequencer device, and the first example of repetitive music technology, powered by hydraulics.
In 1206, Al-Jazari, an Arab engineer, invented programmable musical automata, a "robot band" which performed "more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection." It was notably the first programmable drum machine. Among the four automaton musicians were two drummers. It was a drum machine where pegs bump into little levers that operated the percussion. The drummers could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around.
In the 14th century, rotating cylinders with pins were used to play a carillon in Flanders, and at least in the 15th century, barrel organs were seen in the Netherlands.
In the late-18th or early-19th century, with technological advances of the Industrial Revolution various automatic musical instruments were invented. Some examples: music boxes, barrel organs and barrel pianos consisting of a barrel or cylinder with pins or a flat metal disc with punched holes; or mechanical organs, player pianos and orchestrions using book music / music rolls with punched holes, etc. These instruments were disseminated widely as popular entertainment devices prior to the inventions of phonographs, radios, and sound films which eventually eclipsed all such home music production devices. Of them all, punched-paper-tape media had been used until the mid-20th century. The earliest programmable music synthesizers including the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer in 1957, and the Siemens Synthesizer in 1959, were also controlled via punch tapes similar to piano rolls.
Additional inventions grew out of sound film audio technology. The drawn sound technique which appeared in the late 1920s, is notable as a precursor of today's intuitive graphical user interfaces. In this technique, notes and various sound parameters are triggered by hand-drawn black ink waveforms directly upon the film substrate, hence they resemble piano rolls. Drawn soundtrack was often used in early experimental electronic music, including the Variophone developed by Yevgeny Sholpo in 1930, and the Oramics designed by Daphne Oram in 1957, and so forth.
Analog sequencers
During the 1940s–1960s, Raymond Scott, an American composer of electronic music, invented various kind of music sequencers for his electric compositions. The "Wall of Sound", once covered on the wall of his studio in New York during the 1940s–1950s, was an electro-mechanical sequencer to produce rhythmic patterns, consisting of stepping relays, solenoids, control switches, and tone circuits with 16 individual oscillators. Later, Robert Moog would explain it in such terms as "the whole room would go 'clack – clack – clack', and the sounds would come out all over the place".The Circle Machine, developed in 1959, had incandescent bulbs each with its own rheostat, arranged in a ring, and a rotating arm with photocell scanning over the ring, to generate an arbitrary waveform. Also, the rotating speed of the arm was controlled via the brightness of lights, and as a result, arbitrary rhythms were generated.
The first electronic sequencer was invented by Raymond Scott, using thyratrons and relays.
Clavivox, developed since 1952, was a kind of keyboard synthesizer with sequencer. On its prototype, a theremin manufactured by young Robert Moog was utilized to enable portamento over 3-octave range, and on later version, it was replaced by a pair of photographic film and photocell for controlling the pitch by voltage.
In 1968, Ralph Lundsten and Leo Nilsson had a polyphonic synthesizer with sequencer called Andromatic built for them by Erkki Kurenniemi.