I love sequencers and thought this was going to be pretty bare bone but it has a lot going for it. I wish it had more than two CV/GATE outs, kind of odd for a possible eurorack sequencer but still, being able to sequence 12 different syths over midi, or a few eurorack synths and drum channels in your rack along with some midi out to external gear…along with a good amount of generative stuff and multiple patterns with song mode…all for $399 just might be a great deal.
I definitely have my eyes on it. Been looking for a sequencer for my Moog Sound Studio, and have been looking at the Oxi One but finding it more expensive than Inwould like, and also way too powerful. Maybe this one fits the bill.
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$349 preorder at Perfect Circuit.
I think they nailed it with the price point. Can’t wait to see some more demos.
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The 32 step grid and generative functions seem pretty neat and triggers are always good to have for resetting and clocking stuff.
I wonder if it’s possible to backup projects or are we limited to the 64 patterns?
Nice it can be eurorack mounted, realistic price,
Due to the timing, I think it will go up against the Plinky12 series of controller/sequencers.
The Molten Modular review:
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Got this coming tomorrow. I think 2 of these in a large case would be great. I will play with One first!
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My unit arrived today. Build quality looks good. Looking forward to exploring it tonight.
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Got mine today here at work. The 1.1 update adds separate midi channels for each drum track…thank gawd cause i’m using my Seqtrak as an external sound source for now and each track is on separate midi channels. Not sure if I will rack this or not. I have a small portable rack that I’m using at the moment and a larger one for when I have a fortune and can afford more modules.
I updated the unit. It says you can now change the drum sequencers to different midi channels. But I can’t figure out how. I hold down a drum pad turn the volume knob and all it does is change the note value I don’t understand how to change the midi value.
It actually is a pretty nice sequencer. Using the pads in live record mode having three octaves is pretty nice. Having a few different scales with whatever root note is fine for me.
I still think two of these for $700 which gives you 16 different trigger sequencers and eight different melodic sequencers is actually an amazing deal. You just have to work on getting used to the crappy non screen for changing values and all the shortcuts.
Another update out 1.2. Getting a bitbox so I can have everything in my rack now. Will do a bunch of multisampling from my seqtrak and then be able to take my travel eurorack case all over the house and on trips…woot.
I think someone made a comment on one of the videos on YouTube with instructions. Not sure which one, but there currently only about 5 or 6?
You’ve probably already worked it out but you need to press alt+stop to open the MIDI settings. I also assumed you’d do it the way you tried.
Really enjoying mine so far. Easy to use, but it’s pretty deep with a learning curve when it comes to understanding all the functionality and various subtleties.
My biggest issue is with the breaking of convention on the mute screen. Every piece of equipment I’ve ever owned displays the light dimmed or off for a muted part, and light on for an unmuted/active part. For some reason on the Programm it’s the other way around! My brain can’t get used to it. The rest of the screens follow the convention though. I really hope they change that. Doesn’t it bother anyone else?
I’ve been emailing support with suggestions and potential bugs. They’re very receptive to ideas so don’t hesitate to send them an email.
Finally had the time to sit down with this box. Hooked it up to my Moog Sound Studio 3 and it works really well with the Moogs. Got a fairly good hang of how the sequencer works after about an hour, and it really makes it so much easier to sequence the 3 modules together. Just what I hoped for and I am really looking forward to see where this will take my music making.
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Sounds good. I just bought a few Row Powers so I can power up my rack again where I put my Programm and then can try it out. I had it it’s case for a bit but put it in my rack…want to have that and another sequencer in my 13U rack but had to sell my power supplies a few months back. Should be here Monday so I can really work on learning the thing.
Big update.
Firmware Version 2.0 Changelog :
--------New Features------------
• Evolve pattern generator: The new default pattern generator mode will be “evolve”. This pattern generator will look at your current pattern to make sense of the rhythmic and harmonic information already at play, and it will generate a new sequence that is a variation of the current sequence without being totally different. Think of it as a context aware fill generator.
• Step Audition: Steps can now be auditioned to listen to changes in step mode by holding the step button and pressing the step.
• New Voice Mode: Added Legato Mode as another voice mode for the sequencer channels and made consistent the non-legato behavior of mono mode. Gates longer than the time before the next step do not cause a retrigger event in legato mode, and the live keyboard allows multiple notes to be on at once. This allows performance with mono synths that use digital glide, and it also allows user to play overlapping notes over midi with poly synths. Mono mode now retriggers consistently in live and step mode, over MIDI as well as the analog gate.
• Midi controller pitch editing - Holding a seq.x channel step down and play a midi note on the midi channel associated to that seq.x channel with play stopped will snap the note on that step to the incoming midi pitch. Received midi note on messages with the sequence stopped while editing the pitch in step mode now also snaps the selected step to the received pitch on the midi channel of the edited channel.
• Do it now button: The play button now blinks when a sequence load, pattern generate, length change, pattern extend, sequence direction, or a clock division change are triggered. While blinking, pressing play will cause the function to happen immediately. Please note this is likely to make your sequencer patterns go out of sync.
--------Behavior Changes------------
• The voice mode knob now selects from five modes: mono, legato, arp, chord, and chip.
• Sequences saved with earlier firmware load with their voice modes intact, and are updated to the new format the next time they are saved.
• Mono voice mode now retriggers over MIDI as well as the analog gate. Starting a note always sends a note off for the previous note before the new note on, so downstream synths re-attack. Releasing a note while another is still held retriggers the note it falls back to over MIDI; the analog gate holds through that change.
• Patterns can now be saved while the sequencer is playing without causing significant timing issues. The seq button led will blink until the save is complete after a save is triggered.
• Screens are now sticky, which is to say: timers are no longer active to exit edit screens. All edit screens are exited by pressing the alt. button. This makes edit screens more performative and less demanding of the users attention. The seq load, seq save, clear, and copy screens are exited while their relevant button is unpressed and their relevant action is performed (eg: saving a sequence closes the save screen).
• The Mute screen LEDs now show lit for unmuted sequences and unlit for muted sequences.(inverted from before)
• Pattern Generator received a few quality of life re-workings/re-tunings to make the existing algorithms a bit more musical and trustworthy.
• The pattern generator shares a fixed budget of generation points across each voice’s generation knobs. This means that turning all knobs to max will generate a pattern with a high balance of all the parameters, to prevent generating total garbage.
• Pressing play while playing to trigger a reset of the sequencer now sends a midi clock start message along with pinging the reset output jack to trigger downstream midi clock devices to reset in time.
• Knob improvement: Improved EMA filtering, soft takeover algorithm, exact rails, and value peaking for all the knobs so that they will behave more predictably and reliably and so that exact values can be grabbed more easily. Values can now more easily be checked without changing them by tapping the knob.
• Generate now leaves steps past the end of a channel empty rather than filling all 64. Generating on a short channel and then extending it repeats the pattern cleanly with nothing hidden behind it.
--------Bug Fixes---------------
• Increased the stack size to eliminate issues with memory overflow crashes when using the Arp in CHIP mode.
• Solved a handful of out of bounds edit bugs that could cause crashes in specific scenarios.
• Seq.1 keyboard no longer chokes sequencer generated notes on seq.2.
• The micro-timing hang when loading a sequence while playing is now much improved. Not totally gone, but reduced significantly.
• Songs now save and load correctly across a power cycle.
• Accents are now saving and loading correctly.
• Alt Midi numbers are now saving and loading correctly.
• Condition counters now correctly reset when loading a new sequence.
• The clock now starts at step one every time when clocked via an external midi source.
• When receiving a midi note on message to record on the first step of a sequence after starting programm with midi clock, that message is now correctly recorded to step 1 of programm’s internal sequencer.
• Pitch chance can no longer create octave jumps when used at the edges of the midi pitch range.
• Fixed a handful of out of bounds read bugs in reverse sequencer mode.
• Fixed a few stuck midi note bugs that could be generated by really fast midi in data streams.
• Fixed a stuck analog gate bug that could happen when playing all or most of the live mode grid keyboard notes at once.
• Fixed a stuck analog gate bug that could happen when releasing two notes on the live mode grid keyboard within 3 ms of eachother.
• Fixed a bug where the gate chance never reduced the gate length.
• Modified the pitch chance algorithm to remove large octave swings down and up in high chance amounts.
• Clear+edit+channel+knob now properly clears the chance value for that knob for the selected channel.
• Corrected a few clear function button combinations to match the manual writeup.
• The last step of a full twelve-step song no longer preloads a sequence belonging to a different song.
• When clocked from the analog clock jack at 1:1 division, Programm now measures the incoming tempo. It previously never did, so everything derived from tempo - swing and push offsets, roll subdivisions, gate lengths, and the outgoing MIDI clock - was calculated from the tempo knob’s value while the steps themselves followed the jack.
• Slow external clocks now play correctly. A clock slower than roughly one pulse every two seconds, such as a bar length or ambient clock, used to stop the sequencer and reset it to step one between pulses, then start again on the next pulse, repeating indefinitely.
• The internal clock now runs at the tempo shown. It was running up to about 1% fast because each step period was rounded down to a whole millisecond, which showed up as drift against a DAW or another clock source.
• Fixed mangled and missing MIDI messages passing through MIDI Thru. A message cut short part way through left the parser’s count of data bytes carrying over, so the following message finished one byte early. Note ons went out with a velocity of zero, which downstream gear reads as a note off, and note offs went missing altogether. Once it started it stayed wrong for a run of messages.
• Fixed dropped and stuck MIDI notes caused by real time messages. Active Sensing, which many keyboards send continuously, along with Start, Stop and Continue arriving in the middle of another MIDI message would discard that message. When the discarded message was a note off, the note kept sounding on downstream gear.
• MIDI Thru no longer interferes with Programm’s own MIDI output. Forwarded bytes and outgoing notes were being written to the same hardware register with no arbitration and could overwrite one another.
• The first step now lands on the downbeat every time when started from an external MIDI clock. The first clock could previously be swallowed, putting the first step one clock late on roughly every other start.
• Changing the MIDI clock division while playing no longer causes a momentarily stuck clock output gate and a burst of pending steps firing at once.
• Incoming MIDI clock tracking no longer loses precision after several hours powered on, which had shown up as sync jitter that a power cycle appeared to cure.
• Fixed a stuck MIDI note when far more notes are triggered at once than MIDI can carry, such as sixteen voice chords played across the whole grid. Note offs that could not be sent immediately were being discarded rather than held.
• Fixed a memory corruption bug in the MIDI output path that could produce unpredictable behaviour during dense MIDI output.
• MIDI input recovers cleanly after a pattern save. Saving unavoidably stalls the processor long enough to lose incoming bytes, and the receiver could previously be left sitting on an error.
• Saving while playing now finds quiet gaps correctly when Programm is following an external or MIDI clock. It previously waited out the full save timeout and then wrote regardless, which could swallow an incoming clock pulse and drop a step.
• Pressing a second save pad while a save is still in progress no longer abandons the first save part written. The second press is ignored until the save finishes.
• A pattern save that fails to write is no longer recorded as successful. Such a slot previously loaded back as a channel of maxed out values.
• Settings restored from memory are now range checked on load. A save interrupted by pulling case power could leave a value that was then used directly as a table index on every clock tick.
• Chip mode notes now play at the correct octave when more than one note is queued on a channel, which happens with push, groove offsets, or a roll running into the next step.
• Pending chip mode note offs are no longer stranded when the voice mode is switched away from chip. They could previously leave notes hanging, and also stopped pattern saves from finding a quiet moment.
• Synth gate lengths stay correct after a tempo change on the external clock. They were being recalculated using a drum channel’s clock division instead of the synth channel’s own.
• Notes that fall at the same moment, such as chords and roll edges, now fire together and in order rather than one pass late.
• Turning a step edit knob while the tempo, transpose, or hold screen is showing no longer writes a chance value into the selected step.
• The fine tempo adjustment made while holding edit is now limited to 300 BPM, matching the coarse adjustment. Repeated fine adjustments could previously push the tempo past its limit with nothing to stop it.
• The CV knob clear now works on drum channels. Clearing the octave on a single synth channel also resets that channel’s octave offset, and clearing the gate knob on a single channel resets it to the same default as clearing all channels.
• A reset while a generate is set no longer rebuilds the pattern twelve times over, which was creating lag.
• A note recorded immediately after a pattern save no longer stores a garbage push value.
• Short trigger pulses on the clock and reset jacks are detected more reliably. The jacks are sampled six times as often, which adds margin for modules that send pulses shorter than 5 ms.
--------In the Weeds---------------
• Made memory safe a handful of variable handlers etc. so that refactors don’t surface invisible bugs with memory index out of bounds writes and similar.
• Arp and Chip note lists are no longer edited from two places at once, which could corrupt them under heavy input. No bug was ever reported; found by inspection and comparison with other projects
• Save functions are hardened against having two simultaneous writes triggered which could have theoretically caused data corruption. Found by inspection, not reported bugs.
• Pending generate or load is held back until a set save completes, preventing mid-save edits from breaking things.
• Button scanning algorithm changed slightly to reduce latency.
• Clock state shared between the timer interrupt and the main loop is now read and written as a unit, so a pulse arriving mid read can no longer hand half of one timestamp and half of the next to the tempo calculation.
• Re-timing after a tempo change works from a single snapshot of the tempo. An update arriving part way through could previously leave some queued events scaled against the old tempo and some against the new.
• The MIDI output buffer is now twice the size, and note offs are given priority over note ons when it runs short to prevent stuck notes.
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