Thinking About Grid Sequencers

Grid Sequencers are polarizing and I find it completely fascinating.

On the one hand, they are the interactive technologist’s dream. A novice user can immediately walk up to one, do something to create an effect instantly, and build on that experience in seconds to “make” a more complex sequence of sounds that magically sounds great. What could be better?

Classical musicians just don’t see the point. You can’t really repeat your performance very well, so what exactly makes it an instrument? You can create one short melodic motive, that lasts a few seconds and loops ad nauseaum. Music theorists see them as a cheap trick. Every combination of buttons sounds great because most grid sequencers use a pentatonic five-note scale (the black notes of a piano) as opposed to the seven-note scales of Western Major and Minor scales. 

In my own experience, I had always found Grid Sequencers fun to use and terrible to design for. I had worked on a project for Syzygryd for last year’s BurningMan in which part of the sculpture consisted of three grid sequencers each 16x16 tiles spread far apart from each other. The Syzygryd team was asking for music samples to fill their grids with. The piece could change over time, but the constraint that all buttons if pressed had to sound great together was just too much for me. In that way it didn’t feel like an instrument. It felt too much like making a drum machine, which is not what I had set out to do. 

From a music education perspective, I always disliked Grid Sequencers because I felt they didn’t help the user make a meaningful model that could be generalized and reused. Pitch maps vertically and time horizontally which is great, except that every next interval of the scale is represented as the next square up in the column, even though the actual distance between pitches might vary. It seemed to me that the user was too much at the will of the designer. Whatever pitch that was higher could be a half-step above or a whole octave! How could one make careful decisions about the melody they wanted to create if this was true? The Grid Sequencer while lowering the floor for the novice user and then quickly making more advanced experiences reachable, seemed to have very little to offer to a seasoned musician. It did not reward careful reflection of sounds. It pushed towards quick naive play. 

Having just designed a game for Sifteo Cubes in which the user maps pitch to a block, and reaches others through different mechanics with other blocks, I now appreciate the simple and elegant design of the sequencer. I also see more possibility. Why do there need to be wrong notes for something to be an instrument? 

My freshman year at MIT I took a jazz seminar with the clarinetist/saxophonist/composer Don Byron. He was a student of George Russell and on the first day told use to improvise in C Major. We all avoided the F and B of the scale. Don wanted to introduce to us to Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. He explained that by transposing from the Western major or minor to the relavent Lydian Chromatic scale, as a musician you were able to “paint with all the colors in your palette” as opposed to also having to think about which ones would be too dissonant for that part of your solo in real time.

I think about Don’s metaphor often. That a painter selects which paints he wants to use. He’s not assaulted with all of the colors at once and then forced to keep in his mind the subset he wants to use for his painting. He instead uses the palette to off-load that mental energy. He prepares it ahead of time, so that in the moment of inspiration he can paint freely. 

To me, the problem with a Grid Sequencer is that the palette never changes and the looping cycle is too short. Long enough for a single phrase, but too short for an interesting work to be made. The constant looping, while useful for quick composition, does not reward thoughtful planning of a pattern. Being able to craft a melody that you yourself don’t have to be able to immediately perform is so useful. It is analogous to programming. However, just as programming can feel fairly random if there’s no distance from the code—if you never think about the step-by-step process that the compiler  has to do in order to run your code, if you never had a desired result and were just shooting aimlessly—programming wouldn’t be very compelling. But once the computer does something that you don’t expect, and you have to debug your project, that is where the learning begins. When you can read a piece of code, and guess the result before pressing to execute the code, then you are really honing a skill. In music, it’s so difficult to hold time still. We don’t have the concise language of a result to look forward to. But a sequencer does offer a snapshot of before and after, a way to hold in space what will happen when the next column gets played. Perhaps there is a way of delaying the instant gratification, of working up the ability to predict what will happen, to plan what will happen next and to create a lasting thing that is beautiful and that never existed before.