To Sequence or Not to Sequence, That is the Question

Last night I took the simplified sheet music for Silent Night over to the synthesizer and powered up the electronics.

First I sat at the midi controller and slowly keyed the notes on the keyboard. I’m not good at reading music and picking out notes,  but before long I’d memorized the first eight notes: G, A, G, E, repeated twice. 

By the way,  this is the C major version.  Then I played those measures a couple more times and darn if I hadn’t memorized it.  That is mind blowing, because I’m “not supposed” to be able to do that.  

Then I sat down with the ER-101 Quad Sequencer and started entering notes.  Two weeks ago I had created a “cheat sheet” for that sequencer showing all of the notes that it could produce (99 of them) and correlated that with an 88 key piano keyboard. Then I added the peculiar notation used by the sequencer and created a matrix with the addition of midi notes.  This “cheat sheet” gave me the confidence to add the first 14 notes of  Silent Night into the sequencer. So I pressed “run”, and I sort of recognized the melody.  There were a few mistakes,  notably (pardon the pun) notes entered in the wrong octave.  Then I played it again and realized I had not entered anything resembling duration.  You see, this song has dotted quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes and other expressions of musical time. 

Adding duration to the notes took twice as long as entering the notes themselves. I understood the relationships between the lengths of the different notes, but had to come up with a quantification of the ratios. This time when I pressed “run” it sounded much more like the hymn. 

I’m still not completely satisfied because I’m not sure my tempo is matching up with the 3/4 time signature. So, I’ll practice my best SWAG (sophisticated wild ass guess) on it and see where it takes me. 

Then, I need to add the remaining 33 notes to complete the song, and set up the correct duration, and perform SWAG  for some of the calculations. 

I am excited about pushing the envelope (pardon the synth pun) on the ER-101. This has come about by a decision made about six weeks ago to dig deep into the basics of what I have.  It involved patching the ultimate basic patch and putting out a YouTube video explaining the patch. Then I pulled aside one module and did an in-depth exploration of the module and put out a YouTube video explaining it.  These explorations are primarily for my sake. I’ve learned over the years that if I study something well enough to explain it then this crosses over into the realm of deeper learning. Preparing to teach something helps me learn it. 

Today I walked past the band stands of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.  They come to the cafeteria at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama one day a year to play two Christmas concerts.   In between the concerts I dropped by the cafeteria to get a sandwich. As I casually strolled past the double bass lying on the floor I glanced up at the music sheet on the stand. Hah! All of his music is in the bass clef, I never would have even known that two years ago. This journey has been so much fun.