Video: The Heart Of Sequencer

RunTime: 2mins

Transcript:

T – Hi this is trevor from development team, and I’m with Isabel

I – Hello, Today we are going to cover sequencers, and as you can see we have opened up the sequencer here, and today we really want to tell you some of the unique features of the sequencer that you just won’t see anywhere else and, how it differs from other sequencers.

I – So First off I think we want to start with telling you about the view of the sequencer in Stage Looper

T – View is unique, because this first visually musical sequencer view, compared to another sequencer like Ableton Live, Reason, Logic Pro or whatever, Because they are made for Studio environment, but this sequencer is for Live music.

I – We like to think Stage Looper is more where your music is sequenced instead of a sequencer in itself. If we have a look at other sequencers, say Ableton Live , Reason, Logic Pro, we can see that they use this left right design which is really great for the studio, but not at all designed for the stage. Now we know some DJ’s us it, but of course they can get away with using a computer on the scene,  but most performers can’t do that. We have designed Stage Loopers Sequencer in a vertical design, we’ve done this for a number of reasons , but mainly because this is how musicians see, write, annotate their own music and so therefore it makes sense when performing we would use a similar kind of design. So you see the same kind of things that you would see when creating music like intro, verse, chorus and all the pattern pre-set definitions reflect this. We have literally made it as simple as it can possibly because we know when you’re on stage you need to just see the most important information, so we can see the samples, we can see the pattern names, and we can also see the symbols telling us what it does. So the intro is on an infinite loop here, the instrumental just after it is loopable, and we are expecting that to loop 2 times and so on and so on. Now obviously we can override some of these functions or the loopablity depending on what we have predefined them as in create mode.

T – yea, you said well, so visually unique, functionality is unique also, sequencer is working, like pre-sequencer

I – Sequenced but not sequencer, If we think about it in comparison to other sequencers. Other sequencers are kind of restrictive in a away, because they force you to stay in line with what you have already pre-decided i the studio, can’t really loop, or have the same loopabilty function as you do with Stage Looper, and that’s why we’ve designed it like this. So this is more like a template of how you are going to play on stage. This is how you’ve pre-imagined that you’re going to want to play your music.

T – pre-structured

I – pre-structured, pre-sequenced, but we’ve allowed for variability within that when you play, so as you’ll see when we press on one of the samples that we go into play mode.

T – Song is ready, and action button becoming play. I’m pressing

I – As you will see on the top of the screen, we’ve got a couple of icons that highlight as yellow depending on where you are, so this is basically status bar, so at the moment the lop is highlighted and this mean that we are looping , if we press the ACT button, the other icon, the play icon , which is a continue icon, it telling us that we are going to continue. And we’ve made these icons quite big so that when you are playing see this, often it is quite dark on a stage, so we’ve made them so you can see them clearly, and you know where you are and you know what’s going to happen. Again with all of the icons visually. So pretty much in Stage Looper your patterns will literally play through as you have pre-defined them,

T – Like a sequencer

I – Like a sequence, but the ACT button allows you to override some of these functions, which is your loopabilty, so here we are looping twice and we are on the last loop, but if we press act we are infinitely looping now, so we have overridden the pre-defined loopabilty of this one, and this will continue to keep looping until we press the ACT again, just in time there [laugh] and it goes onto the next bit. Now if we want to we can skip certain bit and go back into the song as well, so here it looks like the solo is going to go into the chorus, but say I don’t want to go to the chorus, I want to go to the next solo, I can just select it like that and it will

T – We skip the second verse because this song didn’t work on the stage for example, audience is not following us, so we do short version. So for demonstration I passing through to last part of the song, final. This is not the official end of the song but it is there like end pattern. So when song is finished it is ready to skip to next song, jump into the next song. Song finished and the act button is ready for jumping to the next song, we see on the top, so you see on the left actual status which is stop, on the right we see the next song. I’m pressing on ACT and song is ready, zero loading time, because all songs are sequenced also.

I – So if we press play we go straight into the next song and this is infinitely looping, so this is set up as you would expect

T – So when I’m ready, I just play on the ACT button and song is going on

I – So what if I want to go back into a song, so like how I could skip forward, I can skip backward, either into the same song or into another song. Here I want to go back into ‘One Life’ and I can maybe click here to the ‘Solo’

T – Ok

I – So it is still play in the second song

T – Ok, I have to , it’s in the loop mode, infinite loop mode , I have to switch to play mode

I- Ahh, It’s a bit fancy it that isn’t it! So in fact this kind of works backward, forwards and backwards

T – Yep

I – And it’s completely adaptable to to how you feel live on stage

T – you can jump from a chorus to another song’s chorus, you can do a medley.

T – Everything’s controllable by one button. I’m using a normal bluetooth keyboard, connected to iPhone and I am using with my foot, it is working like a footswitch, it’s very useful.

I – So in summary, The sequencer has unique view and unique functions

T – in the music industry

I – In the music industry, for the first time! [laughs]

T – Finally I think it will save the life of many musicians on the stage

I – We will show you more features in the next video.