Squarp Pyramid Comprehensive Sequencer Tutorial

hi this is pyramid from scorp and it's sequencer which means it doesn't make any sounds and you can play your own instruments but if you have a sequencer you can let it do it for you pyramid is one of the most feature packed sequencers I've ever seen and it can can fold quite a few instruments [Music] and life moves as well now I've already reviewed pyramid in the past so if you want to see that review there's a link below the purpose of this video is to take a deep dive and look at its features in detail let's start with a bird's eye view this is a sequencer so it doesn't make any sounds but rather its goal is to be the brain or the central hub for controlling all your software and hardware instruments in terms of connectivity it can control dozens of instruments simultaneously and the way that it talks to them is using the outputs on the back there are two MIDI din outputs and it can communicate via USB as well so you can control software instruments on a computer or use a computer to route control to other hardware there are also cv/gate and mod outputs to control modular gear and while we're talking about the back panel there's also an SD card to store projects and to load in MIDI files pyramid also has inputs there's a MIDI input for controlling sequencing and routing MIDI out and these are stereo footswitch cv and gate inputs on the panel roughly speaking this is the transport section these pads are for playing live sequencing and activating tracks there are five encoders and an XY pad that are assignable to any parameter you want across any of the sequencers and they also have some functions in editing parameters the LCD screen with its main data knob encoder and general mode controls here on top now before diving into how to use it there are three terms you need to wrap your head around tracks patterns and sequences a track can contain one or more patterns that have notes and modulation information that can be sent out to your instruments and a sequence tells tracks whether to play or not whether they're muted or not and if they contain multiple patterns which of those patterns to play so if you can imagine the progression of a song you can have these two tracks playing and then this track and come in and this track can come in and then the pattern could potentially change on this track and this track can come in and play one pattern and then it can move to play a different pattern that progression from one to the next to the other is something you can do either manually or control through a series of sequences generally speaking pyramid has four modes red live mode where you use the pads to play notes and automations and real-time the green step mode which you use if you want to enter steps one at a time rather than playing them live the yellow track mode which lets you mute and unmute tracks as well as control various track parameters and the blue sequence mode which lets you create and manage the overall song structure you use this if you either want pyramid to play on its own or change multiple patterns or mute or unmute multiple tracks at once and there are other core features that I'll cover in depth like MIDI effects CC automation the Euclidean sequencer and poly metric and polyrhythmic capabilities we've got a lot to cover let's talk about how far you can push pyramid you can store as many projects as you like on the SD card in each project you can have 64 different tracks stored in four banks of 16 tracks each each track can be realistically any length you like up to 384 bars I think and for each of the 64 tracks you have a choice of how you want to route its MIDI data out whether it's to one of the sixteen channels in outputs a and B or through one of the sixteen channels in the USB output or the CV outputs a track can also transpose other tracks more on that later but just to finish covering the limitations 64 tracks you have 32 sequences where her sequence like I said before you can change patterns or mute or unmute tracks and each track can store 32 different patterns and this is where it might as they say bake your noodle again 64 tracks 32 patterns for each of the tracks and you can select one of those patterns to play per sequence and there are 32 sequences furthermore while you can step sequence in the traditional 16 steps per bar the steps really aren't tied to any particular grid and each step can contain as many notes in as many automations as you like I'm sure there's a limit on storage in here somewhere but you're gonna have to try pretty hard to reach it one more thing in terms of overall navigation you change modes by pressing these buttons quickly occasionally you'll find yourself needing to quickly reach one mode while you're in another you can long press that mode then perform whatever function you want and then when you leave the button you'll go back to the original mode let's talk about the screen a little bit it has a lot of information so it might make sense to break it down generally speaking the top and left sections more or less stay the same and the bottom and middle or right section will change based on the mode you're in you've got the track name up here and that will change as I move between the tracks a track that's grayed out means that it's muted so if I unmute this you'll see it more clearly over here you've got the current sequence and then this will tell you which output that track is being sent to notice how this changes as I move between the tracks when you're playing a sequence the top bar here will show you if information is being sent out or being received via MIDI and this indicator here next to the arrow means information is being sent out on USB generally speaking the center right part of the screen will show you what this encoder changes and then this bottom portion typically shows you the progress of your track or sequence as the case may be each of the modes has an alternate display mode which you get to by pressing this button and that will show you different things as relevant for that particular mode you set the tempo by either tapping the BPM button or holding it and moving the encoder sometimes you'll have access to additional functions by either pressing the encoder or using the second or Shift key so for example to set the BPM I can hold this and move the data knob but if I press it in you can see it moves by 0.1 increments or for example when changing the project tempo while holding the second button the actual tempo won't change until you release the shift or second button moving on with our general overview in terms of MIDI effects which we'll cover in depth later on pyramid has up to four assignable mini effects in addition to the quantization effect and the XY pad and these five encoders can be assignable either for global controls across the project or for controls on a per track basis the stop and play controls on the transport section are pretty straightforward the record button for live does exactly what it says and it has different functions for step track in sequence modes finally generally speaking these white labels are accessible as you can see by holding the second button so for example if I wanted to see the settings I would hold second and settings and then these yellow and green labels are relevant only when you're in the green step mode or yellow track mode holding second and live turns on the metronome and the metronome can be defined in the settings as a note sent on any track you like or on the current track okay so now that we understand the basic layout let's see how we can create a track and put notes and automation on it now since pyramid doesn't make any sounds on its own the first thing we need to decide is what a track is going to control track settings are determined by these settings here and more on tracks later but we won't be able to program a track until we tell it what to control and we do that using the channel function so for example here you can see the track 9a is set to control USB channel one if I select a different track let's say track 1 you can see that that is set to control MIDI a one the control options for tracks are CV outs MIDI a all 16 channels MIDI be all 16 channels than USB 16 channels then there are a few options to choose combinations when the a and B USB and MIDI a and so on and then the last option is this thing here which means that a trance that attract can be a master transposed track that means in this case that this track will transpose any tracks that are set to follow the master transpose and we'll talk about more track features later on but to access the master transpose follow configuration for a track you hold second he'll pull the track and then move over to transpose over here and select it so I will select track nine which is what I'm using to control the profit Rev 2 over here in this case I'm using USB 1 it's routed through a computer but you can control it directly obviously if you like as well before we move on to actually entering notes generally speaking there are two ways to set a track's length you can either do it using the length button and choose how many bars you want a track to be or if you just want to jam live and determine in real time when a track will start looping on itself you go to the settings miscellaneous and you turn on the live looping which also has a quantization factor for when it starts looping ok so we're ready to either play notes live or to step sequence them let's start by taking a look at playing live now while in other modes your master control are these 16 pads whether it's steps tracks or sequences in live mode the layout is a little bit different you should look at these two rows as like a chromatic piano layout and then these pants on the bottom are smart pads with different functions which we'll talk about since this obviously represents only one octave you can transpose using these buttons using these arrows finally if you have a MIDI keyboard plugged in you can play using it as well I've got my metronome going inappropriate cowbell like in practice if I want and then when I'm ready to record simple as that if I don't like what I recorded I can hold second and delete and it's gone now these pads aren't velocity sensitive so if I want to set the velocity at which I'll playing and still use them to record live I can either go into step mode or temporarily hold it and then select velocity and change that here you can see the number change right here this will be the velocity going forward in live mode and I can also record using an external keyboard and then in this case it will be recorded with velocity so let's try that out note the timbre change the harder I press all right so either option works now currently I've got pyramid set into Omni mode so regardless of the track that I record this will always be controlling the active track but if I want I can direct the keyboard to a particular track while we're on the topic of playing live if you hold a few notes and you want them to be held you can press seconds and play and they'll hold its drones and you can change the synth parameters a second press on second and play will move into real edge mode [Music] and then pressing that again will exit we latch all together by default recording adds notes to the tracks so if I play something it'll be required on top the notes will be added if you don't want that just hit shift or second and record there will be a countdown this is called hard record and it overwrites whatever is on the track so that's playing notes straight up using these pads or an external keyboard let's talk about this row which is the smart pads these have four functions which are selected by holding live and turning this encoder what's called the data knob the first smart pad mode is called chord mode and if you hold display you'll see which chord each pad plays and there are lights here to indicate that as well if the notes are in the octave you're looking at and you can change the chord sets by rotating the data knob and you can change the complexity of the chords by holding the data knob and turning it you can add inversions blues so on and you can also reduce the amount of notes per chord if you want the second SmartPad mode is repeat which is pretty simple once you hold the note and then any one of the pads or repeated add different intervals this can be applied to percussion as well of course turning the data knob sets the gate for each note the third out of four SmartPad modes is scale mode and yet who needs Black Keys when you have these you use the data knob to select any number of scales and you use the second button to transpose it one note about this scale feature it only impacts the smart pads if you want to impact other notes in your pattern you can do that using a MIDI effect we'll talk about that later now the fourth and final smart pad mode is custom this that's your program any custom court you want into any of the smart pads you just play the notes you want to program and then second and the pad and then that court is programmed here if you hit display you can see the notes played you can also program chords using an external keyboard pyramid keeps the chord in memory so take your time playing it second to pad and you've got it programmed so this is a really nice way to program big custom chords and you can program 32 of these you see eight at any given time and you can move between custom chord Bank a B C or D ok so we're wrapping up soon on live mode before we say goodbye you've got the second function with copy paste delete and even undo for data in that track let me clear up this track that's basically live mode let's talk about step mode now just like there are a few live modes there are also a few step modes which you access by holding step and turning the data knob let's start with the simplest one which is note mode the way this works is you decide the note you want to enter on to a particular step and then you hit the step there are two ways to set the velocity of a note you either hold the velocity button and change the data knob or you can use these assignable encoders and there's a little icon which tells you what each one does so for example for velocity I need to use this one alright so this is a much faster way to set velocity same for note width I could do it like this or like this you can also offset notes using this or this so that they're not stuck to a grid these two functions by the way the estep Sandie fills are relevant only for Euclidean mode we'll get to that in a bit so I programmed one note let's say I want a G here and then a high C here and let's check out the pattern brilliant and since I'm step sequencing I don't need my metronome anymore I can turn it off right simple pattern now you may have noticed that I entered C 4 here G 4 here and C 5 here but now see 4 and G 5 are gone so they're not really gone right now I'm in a mode which lets me look at one note at a time so these are all the C files in my pattern because it's a polyphonic pattern and then if I go here these are all the g4s and then these are all the C fours in the pattern now that's a pretty convenient mode for entering percussion where this would say be the kick node and then the next one would be the hi-hat but if you want to see a view of all the notes at one time there are two ways to do that number one is hit the record button and now you can see representations of all three notes at once and you can disable notes all of them at once per step if you like and then there's display mode which lets me see an entire piano roll view of everything in my track so I can go and program my c4 here and my g4 here and my c5 here and I can see everything conveniently on a piano roll if you have an external keyboard connected it's really easy to enter notes or chords just by pressing them once and then hitting the pad you want the chord to appear on now these two modes where you see either one note at a time or all the notes at a time are called mono and poly mode it's a little bit confusing poly editing is where you see one note at a time and you move across the piano like this across the piano roll like this and then in mono editing you're seeing everything at once so if I want to clear out my track I can do that easily in mono mode if I want to clear out individual notes I do that in poly mode another benefit using an external keyboard is that step mode remembers how hard you press to note not just which note you pressed so I can enter a little silent note here and harder one here and then a middle one here and that will be recorded in the pattern okay so that's really nice 416 steps but what if you have more than 16 steps in your pattern well the first thing we need to do is make the track a longer and we do that like this and then you simply move between the pages using arrow keys so this is page 1 and this is page 2 and I can move back and forth like this now that works well for 16 32 or 64 step patterns but what if you have really long patterns or you want to drill down into the fine details of a pattern for that you've got the zoom function and because it's a yellow label you know you need to access it by holding track holding zoom and then turning the encoder and then you can zoom in or out and edit either and really find detail or zoom out to see the entire pattern notice that when you zoom in and out you're not just changing the view of the screen but also what these pads represent and it's a little bit hard to have you see that how that pads change and have my hands here but I hopefully you get the idea how the each pad represents a different number of steps depending on the zoom level okay to keep things simple I'm going to shorten my track back to 1 bar and then zoom in if you want to edit existing notes you just hold that node and change its parameter so I'm changing velocity here but you can apply that to anything like length or check out here offset can't see it at this resolution and of course the note itself there's a nifty feature where if you hold a note and press the encoder down it will preview that note you can also shift a note left and right using the arrow keys pulled record and then you can edit the entire occurrence of that note for that track and if you're in mono mode you can just transpose everything right everything you do here applies to all the steps there's also a little performance trick where you can hold second and mute a note in a pattern and then bring it back in an easy way to jump between the notes in poly mode rather than just looking for them like this let's just hit the step button you'll jump from active note to active note you can edit them that way so that is note mode which as you may remember is one of five different step modes right we've got note chord Euclidean sequencing and then I'll talk about things too in a bit all right let's move on quickly to chord mode and this one's pretty simple you choose a chord using the data knob and you transpose it by holding the second button so let's say if I want a yeah why not let me erase these notes and then when I hit a new pad it will enter a chord so in chord mode I can transpose the chord like this I can preview it by pressing down change it by holding 2nd try a bunch of different chords maybe this one and when it got the court I want just place it where I want in the sequence so that's chord mode which is the second mode in step mode let me erase this step and move on to Euclidean sequencing now when the Euclidean sequencer is active the other four step modes aren't so you either choose this or the other four so the idea with Euclidean sequencing is pretty simple you select either the note you want to play or the percussive instrument you want to play and then you just choose how many steps you have in your Euclidean pattern and how many of them will be filled and you can also use these two encoders for it and that's a really nice way to create interesting rhythmic patterns you can also play a chord like this you won't hear it until I activate the pattern but now as you can hear we're applying Euclidean sequencing to a chord now once you set a pattern that you like you can change the chord so that's euclidean step mode and if you layer multiple Euclidean tracks with multiple different notes or percussive elements you can create some really interesting rhythms okay so that's Euclidean step mode let's move on to the two other step modes which are CC modulation step mode and effects modulation step mode I'll start with CC that may be the easier one to understand and then move on to effects so CC parameters are like knobs on your synth they change how it sounds or change its parameters and you can modulate and control and step sequence every single one of the CC parameters of your sins using the pyramid if you want to move quickly between the CC numbers hold second and I'm looking for CC number 102 perfect which is the filter cutoff on my Rev 2 once I've set my control change target I need to set the actual value I do that by setting the velocity and just picking a step so if I've got a pattern here open and close the filter at various levels this process is very similar to parameter locking on electron devices [Music] and there's a more cool and fluid way to record automation which is by holding the record button and moving your hand across the pad [Music] you can also offset the entire automation by holding the cord and turning this encoder or edit steps by holding a step and using this encoder 3 as per usual you can use the zoom function to zoom in and out on your automation so now that you understand cc automation let's talk about the last step mode which is effects automation now we haven't talked about the effects or the MIDI effects yet but by default every track has the quantizer effect built-in to slot number one and we can automate or modulate even those parameters so we can enable or disable quantization we can select the grid we can humanize the notes and there's also a legato feature as well as one of the quantization parameters if I go into MIDI effects and add another MIDI effect and let's choose for example a harmonizer and then saying okay we've got these two Harmonizers going now each of these parameters becomes a destination in our effects automation let's look for these as a destination what do you think let's do this one for example pretty crazy but that's how you automate effect parameters one more thing I think it's worth mentioning about the effects step mode where you modulate effects is that even when you look at the display as you scroll through the different parameters let's say PGA Tour style notice how you can see the exact names of what the target is so it's not just a modulation destination with a random number but rather you can see exactly what you're going to assign to the track okay a few more miscellaneous items about step mode the first is this bottom part of the screen the track player zone you can see that as I increase the track length bars are added in black bars mean that that's the total length of the pattern whereas the white bar represents the zoom level so as i zoom in you can see I'm looking at portions of one bar as i zoom out I'm looking at more active pages or active bars which are represented on this grid here and of course on screen when I move into note mode so this is represented not just in terms of white bars out of black bars but also when you page through the different pages you can see how I move forward between this half of my pattern and this half almost my track back to what it was two bars and zoom level to one bar if I hit play on this pattern you can see this little arrow here it represents which of the two bars I'm looking at and you can have this cursor to track the current position by hitting second and display [Music] few more functions here I'll add these steps notice it says rotate here if I hit a second and hold the right and left arrows I can shift the steps left and right and if you want to duplicate a track you hold track and length and then these arrows will duplicate or divide tracks copy and paste work here as well whether to copy entire pages you copy and basically paste onto the next page or you can also copy step ranges so let's take these three steps hit second copy pick a range and then paste a destination and three steps are copied and when you've made too much nonsense shift delete deletes the page so that more or less is step mode let's move on to track mode front and center these pads are used for muting or unmuting patterns the brightly lit pants are active the dimly lit ones are muted so I can just hit play a little high head here and an arpeggiated pattern here [Music] hunts very simple to mute and unmute tracks we've already talked quite a bit about what these three buttons with the yellow labels do this changes the channel remember USB MIDI and so on as well as the transpose track zooming in and out and changing track lengths solo will let you solo a track right so now we're hearing just this track and you can unsolo it and time signature lets you mess around with a time signature of the track we'll talk about that when we get to paly rhythms and poly meters and remember we have four banks of sixteen tracks you move between the bank's Bank a B C and D using these arrows and you can see that empty banks are just playing numbers here and muted banks are sort of grayed out if I unmute it it will become unmuted and then the active track has those two lines on top so if I move to say track four you see these two lines three two one that's the track we're editing in and step modes the display mode shows you how your tracks are progressing in relation to each other you can tell track 3 is twice as long as tracks 1 & 2 now we touched on track settings before let's expand on that beside these 5 options you also have 2nd & track which gives you access to these parameters you can use the encoders to select program and Bank on your synth and the parameters on top do a few interesting things the first is name your track so this is an ARP no reason not to call it that it's easier to identify tracks this way call lets you call in or bring in hardware definition files now in my setup I've got 909 MIDI on my computer but dig attacked and arrived too I'm using the dig attack track right now so that's that those are the settings that I what I'm using in this particular track a definition file is basically a customizable hardware template and what this gives me if I go back to step mode and go into cc sequencing you'll notice that now the parameters have names which correspond exactly to Rev two parameters remember 102 is the filter cutoff now it's called filter cutoff there are a bunch of definition files on the score forums or you can create your own for example I created this detect file and I gave a name to every note that represents a sample on the dig attacked you can create your own definition files and obviously it's up to you to match between the name and the sample that's loaded on your drum machine but this is way more useful than using note names let's go back to track and track parameters the consolidate function lets you take whatever active MIDI effects you have on the particular channel and consolidate them into actual notes on the track so that you can then free up your MIDI effects slots and do something else with them consolidate will also freeze Euclidean tracks into the new static track that is created once you the consolidate button other options on the track with second and track are the run modes which determine how tracks behave as you move from one sequence to the other whether they continue running whether they run just once and then stop or whether than they reset back to their initial step and start immediately as a sequence changes the transpose function will cause this track to follow transpose tracks remember when we determine what a track does what type of track it is it can go to a MIDI channel or it can go to transpose other tracks so activating transpose will make sure that it follows those master transpose tracks and then finally activating pattern the pattern setting for a track will activate the world of patterns for that particular track so what does patterns mean remember we have 64 tracks which we can mute or unmute and then we can chain them up in sequences where they're muted or not muted per sequence but each of the 64 tracks can also store 32 patterns per track so I prepared an example of this in my dig attacked track you can see that patterns are enabled now to access the 32 patterns that are stored in this track you need to press both the step and track together and you can see that the top portion of the screen has now changed to this view to pattern view and you can tell both by the brightly-lit pad as well as the two lines above the pattern that pattern number two is the active pattern for this track for the dig attack track so let's listen to this and now I can move to let's say this pattern [Music] right or move to this one alright so these are different drum patterns in the one big attack struck here's a nice little shortcut regardless of where you're at hold the step button and you can change patterns and if you look on screen there's also a little p1 p2 p3 to designate the pattern number now patterns obviously do add another layer of complexity to tracks and to creating songs within pyramid if you're uncomfortable with that you can just create individual tracks with say different track patterns or different synth patterns and so on and then mute or unmute those tracks as you want but I think that using patterns makes much more sense because then you have a track per instrument and the different parts are things that it plays per pattern so basically it's up to you to choose which workflow you're more comfortable with muting or unmuting tracks or moving amongst different patterns in one track and you can obviously do a combination of both both workflows are sequence abaut in sequence mode which I promise I'll get to okay so those are patterns within a track now let's talk about time signatures overall pyramid has two modes 2 polyrhythm or poly meter modes or two ways to treat tracks with different time signatures you need to make this decision in the settings which you reach like this as you remember and go into time signature and choose either poly rhythms or poly meters this decision is made on a per project basis I recommend sticking to poly rhythms because you can accomplish poly meters in polyrhythm mode but not vice versa so let's go back to our track to keep it simple I'll mute these and go to track for call up my gig attacked settings and let's just sequence this [Music] and then going here copy this track and then paste it here and then in this track let's do something else so if I have these steps right perfectly aligned for four tracks but if I change the time signature for this track to let's say three fours it's still gonna sound the same because it did its best to realign the tracks but really what's going on here is we have 12 steps in this bar and if I add these here notice that it's triplets so this is moving forward at one rate and then this track is moving forward at a different rate and that's basically the essence of poly rhythms a bar takes the same amount of time whether it's split into four notes or into three notes in changing the time signature you can change the number on top by rotating the data knob and the number on the bottom by holding it in and rotating it so those are poly rhythms and what are poly meters with poly meters each beat takes the same amount of time so a 12 beat bar will just end quicker than a 16 beat bar now you can get an effect similar to poly meters within polyrhythm mode by changing the track length but rather than changing it by single bar steps you can hold down the encoder and change it by fractional bars [Music] which can lead to very interesting poly metric patterns within polyrhythm mode and we can get a good idea at how these tracks are making progress in relation to each other using the display button in track mode alright so now that we understand track mode we know that we can mute and unmute tracks and we know that we can select patterns from within an active track let's take a look at sequence mode pyramid can store 32 sequences in two banks you've got Bank number one with sequences 1 to 16 and then Bank number 217 to 32 a sequence is basically a way to store the mute States and the pattern selections for each of the tracks this might be clearer if I hit the Display button you can see that I have three sequences here in sequence number one the attack pattern 2 is active and the dsi Rev 2 pattern 1 is active and you can see track 1 is muted throughout all patterns by the way and then sequence number 2 I'm using pattern 3 of the dig attack track and still pattern one of the Rev 2 and then with the sequence number 3 pattern 1 of the dig attack is active and again pattern one of the Rev 2 if I go ahead and mute track 3 you can see that it's muted in sequence 3 as well pretty simple right now there are three ways to move about sequences one way is just to perform them live so this is one sequence this is another sequence to sequence three and this one bar here determines how quickly it moves from one sequence of the other you can take a few bars or just move on the beat right now wait and that's how you perform with sequences live the two other options are to set up a chain of sequences and then either play them once or loop them the chain of sequences is written down here and to create a sequence I just move the cursor down press down select a sequence number once I select the sequence number it'll tell me how long full sequence is which is how long it takes for the tracks to repeat themselves fully and then I can choose how long I want the sequence to be so typically I would choose two because the full sequence is two bars and then I can go ahead and add sequence number two and then sequence number three and if I move to either play or loop mode let's choose play my sequence o play alright now it's going to move to sequence two then move on to sequence 3 and thence it's it's on play it's just gonna stop loop will just make it go on forever you can see this little bar here tells us how the sequence is progressing with polyrhythmic chains this could take a while and indeed if I say go into this track and set a an odd length just to mess around with the system let's say this if I now go ahead and add a sequence let's say 1 you can see that it will take a full nine bars to repeat let me just undo the damage here okay we're back to normal 2 bars now sequence mode also has a temporary lanch if you want so if you're in step mode and want to temporarily change your sequence you just hold it down pick the sequence you want and move to that one another nice sequencing function when the sequence is playing you can always hit second and use the arrow keys to immediately move from one sequence to the other [Music] so that's sequence mode relatively simple remember we can go into the track parameters to choose how a track will behave once a sequence changes whether it just continues to run goes back to the beginning and runs once or it goes back to the beginning and continues to run in loop and copy paste and delete works with the sequences as well finally sequence has its own display mode as well they'll tell you what's going on here in terms of which tracks and patterns are active which sequence is coming up next and which tracks are active have content and the sequence length as well that's pretty much it for sequence mode so we covered live mode step mode track mode pattern mode which is both of these together and sequence mode let's talk about the MIDI effects section MIDI effects is one of pyramid's standout features just like audio effects manipulate audio MIDI effects modify note data each track has five MIDI effects slot the first one is always the quantize effect and it's off by default so notes aren't quantized you can tell that it's off by the way because it's grayed out over here and the other four can be anything you want I've got the arpeggiator in here I can go ahead and add another MIDI effect if I wanted to let's say a harmonizer and it will take its place to the right of the arpeggiator now the order of the effects matters a harmonizer after the arpeggiator isn't like a harmonizer before an arpeggiator let me explain so if I have an arpeggiator going here and it's just our page hitting these two notes right and then I go ahead and modify the harmonizer effect [Music] then the MIDI effect chain will first take these two notes and split them up and then harmonize each of those notes if I were to take this effect in a chain and move it before the arpeggiator and you can do that by holding second and turning the data knob we would get a completely different result compare this to this so MIDI notes come in through here and then each effect handles them in turn editing in effect is easy or replacing one you just click the effect and then you can either edit delete or just choose a different one as you like you edit the effect parameters using the encoders so I can add chaining effects can yield some pretty interesting results how cool is this you can also jump to specific effect by just clicking the knob that represents it five knobs five effects there are twelve different MIDI effects overall I won't go over all their parameters but let's sort of just take a look or a sampler at the highlights the quantizer effect lets you snap notes to a grid and you can choose what that grid looks like and then with human plus and human - you can unsnap those notes and legato is a feature with synths that supported it just makes the notes a little bit longer so that the transitions from one note typically in a mono synth to another will be smooth I will turn off the harmonizer just so we can appreciate the arpeggiator there are quite a few originator styles [Music] Tansen octaves this has all the standard moods you'd expect in an arpeggiator and also some very interesting ones I've never seen before cool stuff we already saw what the harmonizer can do let's add another one to take a look at swing swing gives you the usual features you'd expect to see in swing that's quite a few more options like the ability to change the quantization grid and accent either a swung or the first note so that's pretty interesting let's change this to the randomizer let's check that out that will take incoming notes and either randomize their velocity pitch octave or length let's the grounds for a second now this sounds pretty crazy but it might make more sense if we add a scale midi effect to it you can choose the scale than the key and weather notes that aren't in the scale key will be filtered or not and maybe if we have notes that are slightly less random it might start to make sense so that's how the effects work with each other really nicely let me clear out this mess so that we can check out some other effects the delay effect is a nice way to have an effect like delay only with MIDI nice let's bring back my arpeggiator the chance effect lets you randomize not your pitch but rather whether notes happen at all the chance factor determines the probability that a note plays or not it's like a probability filter basically and there are a few others you can get creative with for example the CC midi effect will take a note and convert it to a CC parameter and there are a broad range of cases where this can be useful for example with devices like the volca sample that for some odd reason expect to receive pitch as a CC message another interesting effect is the equalizer effect this is literally like EQ for MIDI so if your synth is too loud on the lows or on the highs you can adjust its velocity based on the note and then finally there is the LFO MIDI effect which is a really nice one because it lets you take any CC parameter send it out to your synth but have that be modulated just like another phone lets check this out in action I'll turn it on and choose let's say a sine wave this works only when the pattern is active but you can see how the graph changes its triangle now you can send this data to any CC parameter over MIDI as well as to pitch pressure and program change so those were the MIDI effects and remember all the MIDI effects including bpm which controls the project tempo and I didn't cover our modulate able destinations within pyramid now up until now we've been using these knobs to change parameters and this to draw automation but you can actually assign each and every one of these knobs and the XY pad to any midi CC parameter you like to do that you hold a sine and then turn the knob and you can choose any number of destinations midi CC is just one of them and all the parameters are accessible here additional destinations are effect parameters we discussed this before in the automation you choose the track and then you choose the effect that you want to change and it's really nice that when you move the knob you see a nice big display of what you're changing if you want to control all the MIDI effects rather than just one track just choose effective master and then you choose the parameter you want to change let's say quantization in this case and it will apply across the tracks you can also use the sine with the XY pad and aside from the CC and effect parameters there are a bunch of neat things you can do like play different notes if you like and you can also assign the CV inputs just hold the assign button plug in a cable and then choose the destination finally if you have a knobby external MIDI controller you can also hold the sine turn one of its knobs and then assign that external knob to a destination that you want let's talk a bit about project management everything I talked about up until now the 64 tracks the 32 sequences 32 patterns per track all of that is one project they don't take much space so you can practically store as many of these as you want on the SD card you access the save and load functions by hitting second and this button you can create new tracks save as rename them or load one of the existing ones a nice little added bonus is that pyramid stores its sequences as regular plain old MIDI files so you can import your own MIDI files from your DAW or download ones off the web and play entire MIDI sequences as if they were any other track in your project you can scroll around edit the notes [Music] just like any other track as a matter of fact if you import a MIDI file with multiple tracks they'll be imported to ask patterns in your project finally let's take a look at a few more settings that I think are interesting now obviously there are quite a few of these here and no time to cover them all on the MIDI in menu there are a lot of options we won't cover them all I think that MIDI echo is an interesting one the idea here is that if you have an external sense where you can't disconnect its keyboard from the synth itself what's called local off and you still want to use it as a keyboard to enter data into pyramid you can turn off MIDI echo and then notes that it plays won't be sent back to that same MIDI out gives you control over what data is sent out which output the CV slash pedal menu has options as you would expect for CV and gate as well as I think the interesting thing here is what you assign to that envelope out and you can choose a bunch of things to go out that voltage output the miscellaneous again a lot more than what we have time to cover live looping we talked about before that lets you set track lengths dynamically signature we talked about as well I think that one of the interesting things here is the auto pattern option the idea here is that you can have the patterns on the tracks follow the numbers of the sequences so rather than having to manually assign pattern one to sequence one pattern two to sequence to pattern three to sequence three this takes care of it for you now there are many more settings here check them out one of them may support overflow you are interested in next up the info screen is actually pretty useful to monitor incoming voltage on the analog inputs as well as MIDI notes you'll see them appear in here and then save lets you save the MIDI settings in case you want to retain them when you turn off your machine so that is pretty much it for pyramid by scorp if you liked this video please hit like if you have any questions or comments write them in the comment section below click subscribe and ring the little bell if you want to see more thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: loopop

Views: 129,090

Rating: 4.9251404 out of 5

Keywords: squarp pyramid, squarp, pyramid

Id: E5FZSKcsLxI

Length: 59min 35sec (3575 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 29 2018