Behringer Crave Tutorial #11 - Sequencer (part 1)

welcome to our next video about the

behringer

crave

today we are going to start talking about the

sequencer

before we do it I just want to thank all the people who have taken the time to subscribe to the channel watch the videos leave some comments it is good to know that this information it's useful and I hope you continue to find the videos useful so if you're not familiar with

sequencer

s the first question we need to answer is what does a sequencer do and the purpose of a sequencer is to store. information and then play it in a loop that continually repeats the smallest unit of storage is called a step and a sequence is just a series of steps that's why you will often hear them called step sequencers now what type of information can we store in ? one step now, the obvious answer is well, that's where we store our notes and that's correct, but we can store other things there too.

We can store the length of the note. We can store how many times the note is repeated during a step. We can store how many. we get to the note in this step, whether it's just starting or we slide into it, we can set the volume of the notes and we can also set if there are any notes, we can make that step silent, so let's look at the different things that we can find. in a single step, the default note in a step is a C in the fourth octave, so if you turn on your longing, you will see that the green light here tells you that we are on page one of our sequencer, the red light says we are on the fourth octave this note is a C if I just press play on my sequencer let's make sure there's nothing there if I just press play I just listen to this C over and over now I can change that to any note I want if I press record and press a flat and I press play now I'm playing that note.

I can also store silence here, so I press record. This is my first step if I press the hold button rest and slash button, now I have stored silence in that step. If I press play at all, you'll also see the green light flashing over location eight in step one and that tells you that there's a break here as soon as I play a pitch. Instead of recording a pitch in step one, you'll see. that the green light goes off that tells me that now there is a note in step one we can also add an accent to a note and what this will do is make the notes a little bit louder and a little bit brighter and raise the vca and the cutoff filter just a little bit, we talked about this earlier in the patchbay section.

This is the default output of the mapping patch, whether a note in a sequence has an accent, so to do this like I was doing before, here's the first one. step, I have an E flat here, if I press the slash accent reset button, now there is an accent on that note and it will sound a little louder and a little brighter than the other notes and you will see that the green light has appeared above the seven, so I'm going to press play and then remove the accent. It's a little more boring if I lower the limit, that will really make a difference.

Pretty boring note. I'm going to add an accent. So you can hear at the beginning, there's a little burst of volume and a little burst of cut through a note that's called gate time. We talked about gate time when we did the patch bay. This is one of the standards. outputs in your patchbay and this refers to how long the note sounds during a step, for example if I go back to my standard here, notice that I'm pressing the shift reset pattern every time, that just erases everything and we just go back to that . a single c repeating I'm recording step one here if I turn up the gate time you'll see this number of lights go up from one to eight and then back down to one one is the shortest amount of time a note will last . plays for a step, so if I were to press play it's a very short note, the step lasts the same amount of time as before, as you can see by the green light here, the tempo flashes as I go faster, the note actually it gets shorter because well, we'll talk about why a little bit later, but if I raise this now to 4, that's the default, press play, the note lasts longer if I raise this to 7, the note lasts almost the entire duration. of the step.

I'll notice that when I increase the step length to 7 from where it was at 4 here, it took a second for the sequencer's tempo to reach where the new tempo knob location was, so if you start changing things around and using the tempo knob tempo, be prepared to hear a little bit of time between the sequencer, understanding that, oh, the tempo knob has been moved, so go back to gate length seven, this is the longest amount of time that you can set when you set the door in eight. What it will do is connect the note to the next step, so if, for example, I record a note in step two, let's say it's also a C.

I'm going to press a C twice now that I have a two-step pattern, now that I've set the gate length of this step to 8. Now there's a tie where this note will connect to this note and the envelope won't trigger again, so now we're just hearing one sound, we're not hearing any kind of retriggering if I change that gate to 7 and then I also change the gate of this step to seven, we'll actually hear two separate tones and you'll see again that the tempo took one second to reach it, so eight is a useful value. a tie, but if you set a bunch of steps to eight and expect your envelope to retrigger each step, it may not happen even if you have different pitches.

I'm going to reset my pattern registration while it's playing. No, you can't change the gate tempo while it's playing because if you press Shift and turn the tempo knob, you'll change the swing, so I'll take step one and turn it up to eight. Step two, I'll bump it up to eight. step three raise the gate to eight now you know the note has changed each time so the notes are as long as possible now let's say I make a change in the envelope. I've increased the attack time but we're I don't hear any timing at the beginning of each tone for the note to grow if I changed my gate time to seven and pressed play.

Now we can hear the gate triggering again, the envelope triggering again, so when you set your gate to 8 you're overriding the trigger condition, so that's something to keep in mind now, until now, when I press play , I hear the note once per step, if I'm going pretty slow I only hear the note once per beat, however there is a feature called ratchet. which will allow me to play the note up to four times per step. Set this up. I've also been editing each step by pressing Shift and then the step I want to edit. I should have mentioned it before if you press shift and rotate.

On the slider knob you'll see a yellow light, this means you'll only hear one note per step if I hold down the Shift key and turn it until I see two two yellow lights. Now I will hear the note twice per step. I can turn it. to three and listen to it three times and I can turn it to four and listen to it four times, so this is called ratcheting. If you have the ratchet enabled on a step, you will see the green light appear above the number six. The ratchet is also affected by gate time, so let's set this tempo here, I'm going to put a triple gate here and then I'm just going to rotate this, okay, now that we have a length of four, I'm going to press play if I shorten the length. of the gate, you can hear that the note is very short if I increase the length of the gate to 7, the note is very long if I increase the length of my gate to 8, remember what happened before the same thing happens here, like this that although I added a bunch of ratchets, it doesn't matter, I set my gate length to eight which means everything is tied together, so if you don't get the functionality you expect, check the longest gate time you can use is seven yes If you want to get things going again, let's add two tones to our sequence, so let's record a new one.

Our first tone is going to be a C and then I'm going to go up from two octaves to six octaves and press C. Again, okay, now I have two tones in my sequence that are two octaves a

part

. Now you'll notice that when the note starts, it just starts as much as you would expect, however, if I went to step two, change two now I'm editing. Step two, I'm going to add slide to this note and I'll do it by simply turning the slide knob until the green light appears over the number five. Now if I press play, the gate time will start by sliding to the target pitch in step two, so you're basically saying that when you turn on the slide I want you to slide to this note instead of just playing it, if I increase the gate time slide, it will take longer if I lower it, you just hear a little scoop.

You may have noticed another problem when I do this, the slide time is so long for the gate that I don't even get to the second octave note, that's how it should sound, so this is a good way to give it a whirl. some of its tones. a bit of an accent, it's just a very short slide time, it just gives them a fun little sound at first, slightly different from the brighter and louder one, so the knob will still determine how much slide occurs, all you can do by one step. is to determine if it slides or not now let's do something else, let's increase the entry time in the first step which is at seven the second step is also seven what happens if I increase the first step to eight and the second step to eight, so now we are getting? a nice slide between the two tones, we slide to step two because it has slide on, but we don't slide to step one because it doesn't have slide on.

I can put the slide on step one by selecting it and turning the slide knob. until the green light appears above five, press play and I can change the amount of glide time here. How long does it take for that to happen? Turn it up too high and you don't even have time to get to the two pitches, so inside each step. Not only do we have the note we are playing, we can also have a rest or a rest, we can also have an accent, we can determine how long the note is, we can add ratchet using shift and glide, your sequencer can store up to 32 of these steps, the Numbers one through eight here will be your first eight with the green light on at one.

If you continue recording steps, this number will change to the green two and then store them in locations nine through sixteen. For example, I'm just going to press record one, two, three, four, five, six, seven eight, now I'm going to add a ninth note and now you'll see two here every time a light flashes. This refers to the last note of the sequence. I'm on page three and now I'm on page four and I'm done, it won't record any more notes. I reached 32. Let's touch this beautiful creation.