My First Sequences

I'm currently enrolled in @sarahbellereid 's Learning Sound and Synthesis course, and I'm learning lots of cool new things. Most of all, I feel I've gained some permission to just play, explore and create. The two synths used are the Surge XT plugin and the Arturia Minifreak. The first is a bi-timbral patch featuring a melodic sequence and a pad, presented as a keyboard split. This is very calming to play, and also to listen back to, and I’d love to incorporate it into a larger composition. My ears keep hearing the third note of the sequence as a downbeat, and the first two notes as a pickup, and this made me think a lot about how we perceive an “accent” if no change in velocity, volume, brightness, or note length is heard. The pad also features my first intentional use of a bandpass filter. Next, I was inspired by Sarah’s use of sequencer “lanes” to modulate other parameters besides pitch. I decided to try using one sequence to create a melody, re-trigger the envelopes, modulate one oscillator level in a downward direction and modulate the noise level in an upward direction. I then used a second sequence to control the wave-shaper drive as well as the amplitude of an LFO affecting the pitch of a third oscillator. So you get this odd change that seems to come out of nowhere because higher values in the second sequence are purposely more spread out. I’m not really “in love” with these sounds, and will have to do some more exploring. Next, I tried creating a melodic string of bleeps and bloops on the Arturia Minifreak. (Sorry the videography is poor. I was trying to operate it with one hand, hold my phone with the other). This sequencer also has four lanes for modulatins that aren’t pitch. Inputting them as stepped values is quite hard to do, but one can also record them in real-time as the pitch sequence plays. I created fairly typical changes such as increasing the reverb time, performing a filter sweep and increasing the resonance, which you can’t really hear because of the type of waveform I used. Last but not least, this was the first of the four I tried to create; it’s just the bass line of the popular song “Hot to Go”; It was the first thing that came to mind when I thought about the best use of a sequencer!