Original subtitles

so what is a sequencer well there's lots

of different variations from the 60s to

now but basically all of them do the

same thing in that they record notes

that you want to be played and then when

you press a button it plays those notes

in the order you played them where

things change are that some of the

really early analog sequencers you'll

see that you have a bunch of horizontal

knobs with incandescent light bulbs

under each knob and it steps through

them and you basically are setting the

knobs to the voltage that you want that

will make the oscillators go to the

pitch that you want and then it will

cycle through those 8 or 16 or more

knobs and that is an analog sequencer

and in modern times you can get an

analog sequencer like something that's

in the d fan in the top row there with

eight knobs and in the late 80s i had a

roland mc500 micro composer which i

really liked and you could simply play

your sequences into it or type your

sequences into it all of that used to be

able to store onto a floppy modern

sequencers a lot of them are built into

the keyboard so here i have the modal

cobalt 5s synthesizer and it has a 512

note sequencer

and every one of those notes can have

five notes at once so it's very powerful

you can also have in each of those steps

up to four knobs can be moving at each

of those steps as well and another

really important thing about a sequencer

besides whether it's an analog sequencer

or a digital sequencer is whether it

records in real time or if it's a step

sequencer a real-time sequencer means

you can just play the way you want to

play in the style you want to play at

the speed you want to play and when you

play back it will play something very

very close to what you played it'll be

microscopically different because of

resolution but

to your ear you won't be able to notice

the difference

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and now i'm going to play the sequence

back and notice that i can change the

tempo because the sequencer didn't

record the sound of me playing it

recorded the notes of what i played and

it's playing the notes back so i can

play them back at any tempo i want i'll

start medium and then speed it up

so now i'm going to do a different way

which is called step recording

some keyboards give you a choice of

real-time recording or step recording a

lot of them only give you step recording

and the beauty of step recording is you

don't have to be able to play in time

you just hit each note or each

collection of notes and then it steps to

the next step so now this time i have it

set up in step time and so if i hit

record

i'm not actually recording i can record

in this first step any number of notes

from 1 to 5 because this is a five note

sequencer so i'm just gonna pick a note

[Music]

so now as i play back this step recorded

sequence it's going to play back very

evenly with exact divisions of time that

i picked in advance

[Music]

[Music]

and as you can see changing the tempo

doesn't do anything else to the song it

doesn't change the pitch it doesn't

change the tonality of it or anything

because it's not the sound that i

recorded it's what notes i press down

that's recorded and when i play that

step sequence back it plays those notes

back into the sense which plays the

notes again which is why they don't

sound different depending on the tempo

in the last 25 years a really big

development of sequencing of course is

the digital audio workstation that's

where you have an application on your

computer or smart device where not only

can you record all of the notes in

either real time or step time but then

you can see them on a screen either

written as notes or these things called

piano roll where you see them as little

ovals that show each note and the

duration and you can click on them and

drag them you can change anything about

them you can cut copy and paste and

not only do you have midi going with

those notes but you can have tracks of

audio that line up underneath your midi

and so you can edit audio you can edit

midi at the same time while you're

editing effects so that's a digital

audio workstation or a daw if you have

any further questions about the many

kinds of sequences that we have

available today please contact your

sweetwater sales engineer my name is

daniel fisher thank you very much for

watching