More music. One of the most entertaining things I own is an Arturia BeatStep, a control surface / step sequencer / MIDI-CV converter. It's simplistic, with just sixteen steps, no ties, no velocity, no swing, and if you want more than sixteen steps you have to manually switch from one pattern to the next. But it's fun, and immediate.
But! Arturia also sells the BeatStep Pro, which is posher, and I was irresistibly drawn to it. It's the chap at the top here:
Arturia also sells the KeyStep and KeyStep Pro, which are similar, but with keys. I wanted pads.
I'll write about it at greater length later on, but the piece of music at the top of the post was recorded entirely with a mixture of BeatStep Pro and Logic, with the BSP generating the sequences and Logic layering them. The synthesiser noises were all created with a Behringer Model D MiniMoog clone, and the rest of it is a mixture of GForce's M-Tron and samples of a TR-808. The bubbly, wobbly bassline was created by feeding different gates into the Model D's filter and amplitude gate inputs.
On a musical level I was inspired by Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. It sounds nothing like it! Except perhaps for the fact it has unsubtle drums over an ambient backdrop. I don't know why I was thinking of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
The BSP is essentially two BeatSteps in a single case, plus an additional drum
sequencer. It has some good things. The sequences can be up to 64 steps long,
not just 16. It has masses of analogue outputs, including a velocity CV port
for the two sequencers. It also has a screen that shows you which notes are
being played, whereas with the BeatStep Non-Pro you had to work it out by ear,
or simply go with the flow. It was easy to work it out because I also have a
Behringer RD-8 drum machine, which has a similar interface because
Behringer cribs extensively from Arturia convergent evolution
or something.
On the negative side the Pro doesn't have the Non-Pro's random step function - a baffling omission - and the sequencing method is fundamentally different. With the Non-Pro you create a pattern with the pads and assign notes to the pads with the knobs, which have an obvious visual mapping with the pads. It's easy. I like to make pretty patterns with the pads, e.g:
With the BSP pro however the pads are a one-octave keyboard, and the steps are actually set with the row of sixteen green buttons just above the pads. You can't draw pretty patterns with the pads any more because they don't change. The fundamental problem is that the knobs still set the note values, and they're divided into an 8x2 matrix, but the pads are a 1x16 row, so you have to remember that the third knob on the second row is step eleven, because there's no longer a visual mapping between the knobs and the pads. There are numbers next to the knobs, but they're tiny.
Tiny, tiny numbers. I would have preferred it if the pads set the steps and the row of buttons acted as a little keyboard, not the other way around.
Did that make any sense? It has a control strip that retriggers notes in a dubstep styl-ee and a probability function that's much less useless than it appears, because you can't assign it to anything. It just does its own thing. And it uses a full-size-USB-to-micro-mini-USB instead of the more common, and more solid-feeling, albeit not much more solid-feeling, breathe in, full-size-USB-to-mini-USB that the Non-Pro version uses.
Tiny, tiny numbers.
