Some people are filter aficionados, some hoard oscillators… I think I’m, first and foremost, a sequencer nut.
For me, the mark of greatness in a sequencer is how immediacy pairs with depth.
For instance, the Cirklon has such wonderful facilities for just immediately building sequences upon sequences, using live recording with a MIDI keyboard (a must for me), and before you know it, you have a song. However, I think that in their current state, the aux effects (the things that take a sequence to unexpected places: probability, ratcheting etc. live there – the depth, if you will) could be a lot more usable. To get simple retriggering effects, you need to configure two rows of aux effects, and then, for that track, you’ve used up 50% of your aux effects. But I’d agree that it has a workflow you can’t get anywhere else – and surprisingly, for me, the best part of it was the ease of doing the basic sequencing tasks.
The Vector has immediacy in spades, but I have two concerns: It is not as coherent as it could be. There are some inconsistencies in the UI and some basic things (like real-time recording) are still to be implemented. I know this is the age of the firmware update, but I try to shy away from situations where I’m waiting for something to be updated to get on with my hobby. Also, it remains to be seen how much depth can be built into the machine. I’d almost classify it as Cirklon Lite: It is a bit less immediate and deep, but is cheaper, smaller and arguably approachable. To be clear, despite what I typed, I like it very much – it’s fantastic.
The NerdSeq is an odd one. Immediacy is an obvious concern. Thank god it has real-time recording. But for depth, I’d go on and say it’s the king. Also, it features a pretty smart way of grouping and chaining sequences to form passages, which allows for a lot of flexibility in arranging songs. It has some nifty features coming up, like the almost 101-style note input where the playhead skips a predefined amount of steps every time you press a key on your keyboard. Also, you can basically have a subsequencer for ratcheting, transposition etc. PER STEP. Fun stuff. It’s like a stride away from your mom-and-pop sequencing towards Teletype.
Polyend Tracker - this is really cool. Step, which is the 101-style sequencing enabler, is here. It also has what I’d argue to be the greatest implementation of random sequencing options – the Fill menu. You can do stuff like “populate steps 17-31 with notes every other step, starting from C-0 and ascending towards C-3, following this scale”. Or “Populate every step with random notes, this scale, constrained to this note range”.
So, to stop rambling like a mad person, I like my sequencers like I like my boardgames: Small rules overhead, but depth for years. (That might be the nerdiest sentence I’ve ever written. <3 )
