Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Hove a question and I know it is stupid,  I don't
understand how a sequencer works?  I know in the who
next album they used a sequencer on wont get fooled
again,  do you play a note in it and it records it?
then I would thind it is a recorder???
Excuse my stupidity, but maybe there are others like
me who are afraid to ask these stupid questions?
and believe me I have allot of them.

I haven't seen an answer to this so I'll try to give it a go.

A "traditional" analog sequencer (like the Miton which I just posted about, the fabled SuperMoe, Moog 960 (?), Serge TKB, and the long illusive MOAS) has at least one row of pots arranged in stages (typically 8 to 16). Each pot is used to set a voltage which then shows up at the sequencer output when that stage is selected. I think these were essentially invented by Don Buchla.

If you run a simple clock at 1Hz to 2Hz into a sequencer controlling a VCO you get that -- bleep bloop beep beep blap bleep bloop beep beep blap -- 1967 "SOUND OF THE FUTURE" which grows so tiring after a few short moments. The best examples of this that I can think of off hand are Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (I can't remember the name of the track since I'm the one guy that never bought that record) and the end of ELP's Brain Salad Surgery Karn Evil 9. If the sequencer has multiple rows of pots, you can then have harmonic bloops and bleeps or use the rows to control timbre or dynamics as simple examples.

But many more powerful things can be done just by making use of up/down, hold reset, and random/psuedo random features. For examples of this kind of use I suggest (as always) look at the early EM records of Morton Subotnick like Silver Apples of the Moon, Touch, The Wild Bull.

In an analog sequencer the voltages can said to be recorded as potentiometer settings. Another kind of sequencer exists called a digital sequencer. I know ARP made one of these, and I believe they used a simple micro processor to digitally store voltages at the inputs and the duration of those voltages. The only sequencer I've used like this was a (then) powerful micro processor based keyboard on a large Emu modular. It was polyphonic but I don't think it had any ability to edit any part of the sequence -- it was very useful for storing keyboard performances, but not very useful beyond that. That kind of keyboard based sequencer was completely doomed when MID came along. Moe can tell you more about both the Emu and the different kinds of sequencers (he also refers to two kinds of sequencers: one is a "step sequencer", and the other one ....... isn't -- Moe?)

The digital sequencer which Paul is releasing looks to be a very powerful controlling instrument (much more than the Emu one I describe) with many of the features of an analog sequencer. I have to admit that I only read a little bit about it and then ordered one. I'm sure I'll enjoy using it and it will be much easier to understand how many uses it has when I can try it out.

Hope that helped somewhat.
JB