Step Sequencer Please

[Landsphere]

Hi Arturia..

Ive owned an origin from the early days.. Integrated it with the other components in my studio, and generally love it..

Ive read plenty of posts on here, about all and sundry, but the one thing that does seem evident, is the lack of talk of the origin now from a company perspective. There have been veracious fixes and features talked about by yourselves over the past few years, we've even got a few things out of the blue we didn't expect (SEM Filter), But what we'd all like to know is.. Do you see a time when your team might come back to the origin and polish off a few of the existing issues, or maybe add some more.  It would put a lot of users minds at ease if they knew you'd not forgotten about us.

Me personally would love the sequencer to be able to send midi out, something that was talked about 4 years ago.. (and yet, as I could really do with one, Im looking at having to lump out £400-£500 to get something, my awesome origin is quite capable of.)   

Could you at least come back to us and give us a status report..??

Rob

[Philippe]

The Origin sequencer is an emulation of an analog step sequencer. That is it has been designed to output (emulation of) analog signals (step value, accent, trig...). So there's a conceptual difficulty which is how to map these "analog" signals to MIDI messages: NOTE ON / OFF, CC...

We may map a TRIG to NOTE ON / OFF, I mean sending a NOTE ON when entering a step where a TRIG is enabled, and sending a NOTE OFF when the TRIG is disabled. But then what would be the note value and velocity?

We could map the step value to a MIDI CC. Maybe we could use the (quantized) step value to determine the note value?

It would be difficult and somehow impractical to map the accent (which is a simple 2 segments AR envelope) to MIDI messages.

There is another difficulty which is where should we save the sequencer MIDI mapping? The current sequences are saved in a global (and limited in size) sequence bank. Should we tie the MIDI settings to the sequence, or to the program that uses the sequence? I'd tend to think the sequencer MIDI mapping would be specific to a project or to a single sound, but I may be wrong here.

Another radically different approach could be to consider the Sequencer as an engine capable of playing either an "analog" sequence, or a MIDI sequence, or both. That means "Analog" and MIDI sequences would be distinct objects, saved separately.

Anyway I'm interested in hearing (reading) from you the Origin users on that topic.

[DrJustice]

Since the sequencer "CV" output can be connected to multiple destinations, there could be fixed destinations called "MIDI note" and "MIDI velocity". Then you would be required to make at least a "MIDI note" connection for any MIDI note on/off messages to be generated at all. The note number would correspond to the note generated by an oscillator module for any given value CV  (quantized to semitones). The velocity could stay at a preset level until you make a "MIDI velocity" connection whereby the range of the CV would map to a velocity of 0-127. There could also be one or more "MIDI cc N" destinations, where N is a fixed (selection of) CC number(s) using the same value mapping as for velocity. The  MIDI note on/off messages could, as you describe, follow the triggers, sending note on at the beginning of an enabled step, and sending note off at the end of that same step.

Now, I only suggest that because I'm a synth nerd... In reality I'd much rather see the last few bug fixes and the ARP-2600 and CS-80 templates being implemented before any excursion into features not in the specification is being made.

[Landsphere]

Thanks for the reply Philippe..

Would it be possible to store the midi settings per patch? I'd look to set up a few patches, purely to use as an external step sequencer, that way I'd be adding no actual modules to the patch (saving space??) or maybe it could be possible to assign purely 10 patches (as an example) with extended patch space to save the extra information? (So as not to eat up 1000 patches worth of available memory resource)
It would suit me to have separate analog and midi sequencer patches if it makes things easier to do.. Something is better than nothing I'd think.

The note velocity could be set as a standard value for that sequence.. It's only the dedicated big step sequences that let you get knee deep into the details of each and every step.
The TRIG to note on/off seems seems the most common sense to me..


The reason I brought up the discussion, was I found a thread from four years ago where you discussed it..  I look at the doepher dark time step sequencer (I appreciate it has no modular monster built in) but that allows you to step sequence by CV, midi, or USB.. I realise you won't get all the fancy options over midi and USB that cv can pull off.. But it's something.. And if your step sequencing something else, the odds are your hands are tied up elsewhere.. It would be good if we could get the origin to output the notes over midi, we could get some simple loops of our other gear on the go.

Out of curiosity, the mini brute se that's due out in a couple of months.. Does that output the step sequencer over midi? How have the team handled it? I know there's no big LCD and GUI for creating the sequences like the origin does..? Can a few of those ideas not be borrowed?

fingers crossed.   

Rob