What's the best stand alone hardware sequencer?

[sensum_clunch]

Cirklon is wonderful and I’ve put the case to Collin, who makes them, that a Max object would allow us to use our Grids and custom Max toys to extend it’s already very comprehensive OS. My fingers are crossed for that.

[rick_monster]

meanwhile back at the lab…

The experiment hooking common lisp program right onto raw alsa midi was a wild success. Amazingly my slave clock keeps in sync with a 3 or 4 second loop simply by measurin the time (in microseconds) between 2 bro-sync messages from the boomerang pedal as they come off /dev/midi4. I ran this for half an hour or so with no perceptible timing drift. The metronome-less aspect is a huge win I have been dreaming of this for literally years!

So now I can sync a rudimentary white whale / dsyn scene on aleph to free-time boomerang loops, which is pretty satisfying. linux laptop is the nerve center of this setup, so looking very plausible I can deploy to beaglebone black / raspberry pi / odroid then set about building that into a box with integrated footbuttons. Slowly but surely my dream rig is coming alive…

[lloydcole]

Very, very interesting. Sidetracked by all sorts of other stuff right now but I’d love to follow up on this and test with my Echoplex at some point in the near future. This is exactly how I’d like to work… not all the time but definietly some of the time… no tempo, no grid, just notes and (maybe) a delay line. Knobs. Keys. Loops.

[GC19]

The Radikal Technologies Spectralis 2 is an extremely powerful sequencer. It has an analog synth part, with a real analog filter, and analog filterbank, 3 sample based synth sections and 12 drum parts.

[Heath]

Subjective, but Cirklon?

[bradfromraleigh]

I will preemptively disqualify myself as someone knowledgeable on the subject but I have an idea that may be worth vetting for some of the more technically savvy…

Is there a way to integrate something like the DJ Techtools MIDI Fighter Twister with a Monome 128? Basically, using the Monome as the step sequencer and having the Twister serve as CV/MIDI CC per step for a variety of assignable functions. The key would be having the visual feedback from the LEDs in the Twister match with the Monome. Seems like a very powerful and pretty modular sequencer that wouldn’t cost a ton especially if you already have a 128. Combined with something like Volta or Reaktor Blocks 1.2 to utilize soundcard CV out would be even better.

[circuitghost]

Pyramid. Had one. Loved it. No nonsense, straight on music machine.

[jasonw22]

The more I see of Kilpatrick Audio’s Carbon, the more appealing it seems to be.

But I’d be pretty happy with Mark Eats Sequencer, if there were only a simpler way to also use other monome apps in the same session. But I guess that’s what the Trilogy + Teletype are really for.

I bounce back and forth between wanting a standalone hardware sequencer like Carbon that can speak both MIDI and CV, and wanting to stick with the monome ecosystem (but that means biting the bullet and committing to CV for the most part, and I’m still pretty hooked on MIDI).

[rick_monster]

Buttons finally arrived after nearly a month!

Unfortunately I’ve been too busy hiking & canoeing round BC wilderness to do much at all with music or music toys. Just playing some bass in a cover band to keep my ear in - haven’t even practiced guitar in weeks…

Starting to feel the crazy fervour returning for an open-source hacker’s sequencer bridging lisp, aleph & boomerang pedal…

[elquinto]

If u like to diy, the groovesizer TB2, RED and MB look pretty capable. (never used one though)
http://groovesizer.com

[sandy]

Probably a bit unobtanium by now I imagine (don’t think there have been any made in about 5 years) but the genoQs octopus is worth a mention. Very powerful and they look stunning. Not exactly good if you have limited space though!

http://www.genoqs.com/octopus/

[chailight]

@bradfromraleigh - I’ve been tinkering with this very idea, having a Twister and a somewhat DIY 128 setup (two 40hs - old school

Are you using monome apps in Live or straight Max patches?

Either way, it wouldn’t be that hard to wire up support for the Twister. I was working on adapting the Mono Sequencer patch in Max for Live so that it used the monome as a control surface. I was using different pages to allow velocity (for example) to be set per step as well as the note, but you could equally well take input from the Twister into the coll that stores those values per step and output them as part of the MIDI note.

I got close to what I was looking for hacking on the Mono Sequencer, but it was getting messy, and I really wanted to just use the monome with my modular without having to boot up Live etc. etc. My DIY grid setup means Whitewhale isn’t an option - hence I’m currently taking what I learnt from the Max for Live attempt and jumping across to python on a Raspberry Pi as something that can be more or less dedicated to just running a monome sequencer for the modular.

In any case, if you want to have a go at adding Twister support, I’d be happy to share my Mono Sequencer hacks - it was never solid enough to post back on maxforlive.com but I don’t mind sharing with those who are interested.

[praffensperger]

I’ve only read about this but it looks pretty awesome to me:

https://koma-elektronik.com/?product=komplex-sequencer

[spqr6510]

I just bagged a doepfer regelwerk for free

and i’m super impressed with it

would recommend trying to find one if you can
s

[bradfromraleigh]

I mostly use the apps in Live - it helps my workflow to keep it set up consistently and not get lost down the quagmire of setting up software (for a non-programming savvy person).

That being said, the new DIY faderbank posted here seems to be a very elegant solution. I actually do not own a Twister but considered purchasing one. I’m hopefully building a faderbank soon so the Twister may not happen.

I believe a good way to keep it modular would be to create an app to interface with the sequencer that can be MIDI mapped in Live - identifying 16 parameters to map and having Grids choose which step to modify using those parameters. Grids kind of already does this with Flin and White Whale - I’m just envisioning using a Twister or Faderbank to input additional control with immediacy. I think the real power would be able to make everything assignable. Picture having 8 additional controllers for things like velocity, pitch register, envelopes, waveform for per step and then having the last 8 controllers be for global functions like track levels, FX sends, etc.

[ClaudeLeBelge]

You might have a limited view of sequencers, due to the time we’re living in. What you probably mean is Step-sequencers, as I don’t know about any Real-Time Hardware sequencers being produced nowadays… Here’s a picture of the best one I know, it’s only 30 years old.
I personnally use the sequencer inside my Roland Fantom (~15 years old) and sincerely, I don’t know where to go from that when it dies.

[chailight]

There is an example of something close to this in the rene8 max for live patch that had been posted here somewhere. Will see if I can find the thread but if you search for rene you should find it.

Would need to be adapted for use with other devices, but it might give some inspiration.

[rick_monster]

a very tired old roland MC50 was the main inspiration for my sguenz project. The thing I got off ebay few years back always had problems - intermittent buttons & scrollwheel, dying floppy drive, occasional random reboots (probably dry joint somewhere on pcb power - never checked inside to try and fix). Kind of liked the setup, and made some strange music with it before diving down a jazz guitar rabbit hole for years and disowning such silly electronic toys…

You can do some kind of limited looping with that mc50, but I’ve been dreaming for ages of a ‘hardware’ sequencer (i.e no screen, button interface) that works like a flexible looper a la boomerang, whilst allowing as much of the ‘composition’ abilities of the MC50 as possible without introducing menu-diving or a scroll-wheel (by version 0.1 feature-creep also spawned an idiosynchratic step-sequencer). Turns out this is a pretty worthy challenge, but I just last night got a warty early version of the software to run on power-up with an embedded linux device. Back to the future!

[zebra]

i’ll go ahead and say that the 251e has a really interesting model of rhythmic representation that i haven’t seen before or since. stage durations are just arbitrary rational numbers. really interesting loop system where you can nest loops and set different counters for begin and end points. very flexible trigger logic. classic DB interface that seems impossible at first but flows pretty naturally.

it’s not quite “standalone” but it could be. i don’t believe anyone has really dug into it properly yet, even several years on.

[jasonw22]

Just did some googling around and found a couple prospects:

mloop looks super simple and that sounds nice:
http://fuzzle.org/~petern/mloop.html

giada sounds super powerful, and I think it will work as a midi looper?

Giada - Your Hardcore Loop Machine