THE CM GUIDE TO STEP SEQUENCERS

Musicians, composers and inventors have been looking for ways to automate the process of playback for as long as drummers have been showing up late for practice. Well, maybe not that long, but at least as far back as the 13th century, when mathematician and scholar Al-Jazari crafted a group of musicplaying automatons in a boat to entertain guests at a lake party. Of course, like the player pianos that would become popular some seven centuries later, Al-Jazari’s antique androids were a costly novelty, rather than a serious attempt to create a new form of musical instrument.

In the mid 20th century, inventors like Raymond Scott, Robert Moog and Donald Buchla would draw upon advances in electronics to do exactly that. Those early analogue designs would fuel entire genres of music, from the vaunted ‘Berlin School’ of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze to the thumping electro-disco of Donna Summer.

Those early analogue designs would eventually come to be replaced by digital variants which, in turn, were kicked to the curb by complex and powerful software sequencers that had more in common with musical notation than they did with electrical pulses. Nearly every DAW on the market offers step sequencing in some form or another. Indeed, many of the most popular DAWs actually started life as glorified step sequencers.

Yet the recent fascination with all things analogue has brought the step sequencer back to the fore as modern musicians rediscover the beauty of these simplistic, inspiring tools. These days, the step sequencer has found its way into everything from iPad apps to effects processors.

Over the next few pages, we’ll look at how the step sequencer can be used to supercharge your productions with step-by-step tutorials of some of the best sequencers available.