[BILL DEMONSTRATING ARPEGGIATION]

Welcome back to Gearwire.Com and this is my video on the Andromeda from Alesis regarding the sequencer and arpeggiator, if you couldn't from my little bit of analog wankery there at the beginning of the video. In this video, I'm going to take a look at not only D minor, the saddest of all chords, but progressing with chords throughout the arpeggiator and setting different patterns within the sequencer so that when you play it back, it reacts to not only middle C but other notes you play. So, for example, you can set up your sequence with middle c as the root, and have other keys within that sequence and it will react so if I set a sequence for example and I play middle C [BILL PLAYS ARPEGGIATION], it's like another patch just to keep things a little more clear [BILL PLAYS SEQUENCE] -- there we go -- but then I play up [BILL PLAYS SEQUENCE ASCENDING THEN DESCENDING]. So, we're going to see how it's done. Let's go in closer for a better look at how this works.

[BILL TWEAKS ARPEGGIATOR AND SEQUENCER PARAMETERS]

The arpeggiator and sequencer on the Andromeda are really pretty cool. We have the arpeggiator here and sequencer here. Right now, I have the sequencer on, set to view so I can see all the settings over my LCD screen, and I control tempo right here [BILL ADJUSTS TEMPO] or I can sync if I want to the rest of the clock [BILL SYNCS TEMPO WITH CLOCK]. Now, you'll see I can take this far because I want or take it very, very slow.

Looking at the arpeggiator without this, you'll hear a distinct difference in how it plays back the sounds. [BILL DEMONSTRATES ARPEGGIATOR]. Moving over to my LCD screen, let's take a look at how to program each of these independently. So, you'll notice that some of the arpeggio patterns aren't exactly the best in the world, but the reason for that is this thing is fully editable. You go to length here [BILL TWEAKS LENGTH], you can open up the length. You can also take the octave up [BILL TWEAKS OCTAVE], change up the center, change the type of arpeggio so like we can do a forward one [BILL DEMONSTRATES FORWARD], reverse [BILL DEMONSTRATES REVERSE], and random different types [BILL DEMONSTRATES RANDOM]. You can also change up the chord pattern here so we can also add automatic chords. Basically, you still play the chord and the arpeggio will play on top of that, so you'll see if I turn it off [BILL TURNS AUTOMATIC CHORDS OFF] it just plays the arpeggio, turn it on [BILL TURNS AUTOMATIC CHORDS ON], we get the chord and arpeggio.

Also what's called latch which allows me to just hit one key or one chord, and let it keep going for a while [BILL DEMONSTRATES LATCH]. No hands. You can also assign the run over here by hitting the button.

I changed up the sync. Here I've got it at a quarter note. It was at 16th note before [BILL MODIFIES SYNC]. They way I did that was I'm in the arpeggiator edit mode and I go on my lower keys here and I hit sync. Be careful because you don't want to hit this; you want to use this knob so we have quarter triplets here [BILL ADJUSTS SYNC], let me take it backwards so it's faster. You can twitch with the latch as well so this can run full time, but here you'll see we also have progressive: this determine the number of cycles in progression.

Let's go back to the arpeggiator. We can determine the trigger as well the type of trigger triggering this. Right now it's a stopped arp so I can actually turn it back to run, turn latch on [BILL PLAYS ARPEGGIATION], turn the chord on and off, again we can switch up the type of pattern, change the center, change the octave, the length [BILL CONTINUES TO MODIFY PARAMETERS], over here change the local BPM, now I can change the master BPM over at the main control.

Now, with the sequencer, we have a slightly different option here. Great. So, we'll bring up the view for the sequencer. Right here, you see we don't have any notes yet, it's just straight across, but it has A, B, C, D, E. It's really kinf of bizarre how it's laid out because unlike a lot of ones you might be used to where it has the number of the measure or the note, we're provided just with where it's at in the alphabet, which is interesting because it gets a little confusing when you get into the notes, but each note is marked down here. The first on C0, you can take the second one at put it all the way up, so we can do like a -- for when you want to do like an early 2000's electro-clash type line, you can do like an up and down type of deal. The trick I find, though, is getting these to actually stay where you want them. I'm sure there's some shortcut to this that I haven't learned yet. Or let's say we get more of an industrial or an Acidy bassline. In this case, I found an industrial-kind-of-sounding one [BILL PLAYS INDUSTRIAL BASS LINE SEQUENCE]. So if I select the sequencer view, go into here and I can actually change these up at random [BILL TWEAKS SEQUENCER PARAMETERS], go to my next step. You'll see it goes to I, J, K, and L. You'll see those notes start to pop up over on the other side [BILL TWEAKS SEQUENCER PARAMETERS] and I can go forward again. It sounds like it's going to kind of create like a bizarre pattern but you'll get the idea.

[BILL PLAYS BACK SEQUENCE]

Well that was a pretty basic overview of sequencer and arpeggiator. Again, I've only had a little bit of time with the synthesizer, but I'm sure if you own it or if you have a friend who owns one, you can sit down and program way more interesting sequences or arpeggiator patterns than I did. This is basically how it sounds and how to use it. For more information on this synth, check out Gearwire.Com and then search for Andromeda or Alesis Andromeda, and you'll find plenty of videos that I've done on this synth. For now though, this is Gearwire.Com and my name is Bill Holland.