YAMAHA SEQTRAK - 30 advanced tips and 5 things to know before you buy // Review & Tutorial

[Applause] hi seek track is yamaha's return back to the portable Groove boox Market it's got plenty of buttons and Hands-On controls it's loaded with internal sounds and synths and it can sample too Yamaha already have a good beginners tutorial for it on their channel so in this video I'll focus on tips and ideas that build on the basics or stuff I wish I knew when I started using SE track and then I'll discuss pros and cons in light of the competition including a few things to know before you buy before I start no disclosure I bought seek Track full price though shout out to toen for the fast shipping and as usual no one has any say over the content of this video this channel is funded mainly by viewers who subscribe to exclusive content and book updates on patreon YouTube premium and ads and price check affiliate links in the description which help the channel regardless of the product you choose to buy before I jump into the tips a quick overview for those of you not familiar with what this is It's a portable Groove box with a built-in rechargeable battery it's got seven monophonic tracks and four polyphonic tracks two based on yamaha's Flagship awm2 technology a four operator DX FM based engine and a sample track that can trigger up to seven different samples at a time then there's a control section that can edit four parameters at a time it doesn't have a built-in screen rather these backlit labels show you which parameter you're editing and this LED strip will show you its value there are more parameters than backlit labels available so at some point it'll just say other and you'll have to gradually familiarize yourself with what the knobs do either by ear or by using the companion app speaking of which if you have a phone or computer around you can pair seek track with it and use that as a live Wireless screen with a fairly good refresh rate it's a bit laggy when you swap screens but once you actually edit parameters it updates pretty quickly these three test strips by the way are assignable so they don't necessarily do what's printed on the panel then further to the right is a built-in microphone and audio input for sampling and a speaker for emergency use only and higher frequencies the build is very light the enclosure is plastic as are all the non velocity sensitive Keys same goes for the knobs all of these by the way are endless push encoders there's also a surprising number of buttons on the front panel on the sides both sides and on the back so that's it for the overview let's Jump Right In and start with the tips probably the thing that I found the most annoying about this one I unboxed it is that you can't press the buttons on the side without the whole unit moving at least not on a smooth table like this now you can always hold the unit down with your other hand or with a thumb and then press a button but as you can see I no longer need to do that the solution is pretty simple if you stick rubber guitar pedal feet on the bottom problem solved I recommend going all out and putting six or eight of them because if you only put four the unit might Flex a little bit in the middle if you do add these feet as a bonus the unit now floats a little bit so you can tip number two sneak a cheat sheet of the most important non-obvious shortcuts under it like the one I'll post on my patreon but you can make your own with ones you think are most important because there are quite a few to remember next tip you can unlock quite a bit of functionality with this USB port it's not just a device Port meaning that you can charge with it or connect it to a computer but it's also host Port meaning that you can connect USB devices to it so for example this is properly charged I'll unconnect it from power and connect a midi controller to it so this now both Powers the controller and speaks midi with it the first seven drone tracks listen to channels 1 through 7even so for example this is now on Channel One and I can now play and program this with velocity sensitivity these are channels 8 9 10 and 11 and it gets even better with the synths these are on channels 8 9 10 and 11 and they're velocity sensitive as well so if I move to channel 10 I'll control the DX synth and you can see its tamber changes with velocity and if I browse through the presets a bit [Music] classic DX FM engine yeah this becomes a full DX or a wm2 synth using the built-in sounds now unfortunately you can't play the sample track chromatically currently so if I go into Channel 11 then most of the keys don't work and I can trigger the seven built-in samples using these Keys the next bit of functionality that an external keyboard can unlock is easy chromatic sequencing for the drum tracks not just the sequencer tracks you can sequence these chromatically currently by entering a step and then long pressing it and changing its pitch parameter locking its pitch but it's much easier say if I've got this cowbell to just play it live chromatically there is by the way a built-in keyboard mode here for the synth tracks but you can't use this at least not in the current firmware to play the drum tracks but wait there's more there is one more bit of functionality that an external keyboard unlocks if you parameter lock pitch using this encoder as opposed to playing in notes live into drum tracks then you can transpose semitones but those semmit tones aren't sent out over midi for some reason don't ask me why I found out that if you play a pattern into a drum track and record it as you're playing these notes then get sent out the midi ports as midi notes so you could then use each of these seven tracks as a monophonic midi sequencer for an external synth and you could then feed that audio back into here apply these effects to it so use any one of these tracks as a midi sequencer and leave these for the internal synths and I know you're going to ask I tried you can't sequence polyphonically on these tracks only on these tracks then one final trick and good reason to connect a midi controller to this if your MIDI controller has knobs or faders you can assign these to specific parameters within seek track this means for example with this controller that you can use these eight knobs say to control specific parameters across specific tracks or use these as volume faders for different tracks and I tried SE track and power this controller too which is pretty cool and next tip there's yet another good use for this port so as you may know seek track comes with this dongle for Midi out and in the problem is that this dongle isn't standard this port is proprietary to Yamaha so theoretically if you lose this no more midi in and out however I checked this works fine with USB midi interfaces so for example with a USB midi interface like this you can have three midi outputs and inputs and if you like you can even hook up a Bluetooth midi interface to this and use Bluetooth midi with SRA sraak does have Bluetooth but at least as of the current firmware that's only for connecting to the app on your phone or a computer and then one final midi tip if you do connect a midi controller to this regardless of whether it's over USB or just the regular midi ports then make sure the MIDI settings are set as you'd expect them to for example if clock sync is set to external the MIDI controller can take over the internal clock here you can set this to internal if you want this to lead also make sure start and stop messages are as you want them to be speaking of the app next tip is when at all possible use the app in guey editor mode there are other modes here that help you figure out what's going on initially say for example the dynamic tutorial mode will show you what a parameter or Knob or button does when you press it but I think that gooey mode is where it's really at this is what makes sure that as you move around the interface everything in the app stays in sync guey mode is great training wheels for seek trck the right side always shows you what these knobs do for the first Pages that's what the backlit labels do but for the others you want to make sure you're not lost so guy mode shows you not just which parameter you're controlling but also its value and the rest of the screen obviously helps you locate pretty quickly where you are within the interface it's also nice to see the names of the sounds as you scroll through them by the way if you want you can lock a screen so notice that when I press this it moved away from the parameter names you can lock this screen so now regardless of what else I touch it'll stay on the screen so you can scroll through the sounds like this until you find the one you like without without stuff jumping around the app is a great way to get familiar with seek track I find that I don't need it as much now but it certainly helped me ramp up very quickly next tip there are a few default States for seek TR that I think you need to change the most important one that really confused me initially if you want to sequence the drum tracks out of the gate it's pretty easy you just activate triggers in any step you want for the drum tracks however for some reason by default you can't step sequence any of the synth tracks notice that I'm still looking at the drum track sequence steps even though I selected a synth track so out of the box without reading the manual I couldn't figure out how to step sequence these but luckily if you press page and any one of the synth buttons that now activates step sequencing for all the synth tracks I'm programming a mess here so we won't listen to this but as you can see per track everything is programmed same thing for the sampler steps you can choose a sample and see sequence any one of the samples any way you like and I'm almost scared to press play but let's do it so I don't know why this mode isn't turned on by default but the first thing that I do is turn it on the next mode that I always turn on is the advanced mode for the drum and synth parameters so by default out of the box you only get two parameter Pages for each of the tracks a page that lets you control sound pipany panning and volume for the synth tracks and pitch and the other parameters that's page one and then page two is a Tac Decay filter and residence and that applies to all the tracks so that's page one and page two a long press on this button unlocks the other Pages which is three pages for drum tracks four pages for synth tracks and five pages here we go for the DX track now it may seem intimidating because you get a lot of other parameters which you know who knows what they control unless of course you have the training wheels on which is the app but it's not that hard to remember page three across all the tracks is always Reverb And Delay sends for knobs 1 and two and then EQ for knobs 3 and four there are no more pages on the drum tracks and for the syth tracks the third page is the same as the drum tracks in the fourth page only says other but that always controls the arpeggiator and who doesn't want an arpeggiator so that's really cool and then the fifth page for the DX synth page five are all the FM parameters which are always fun to mess around with and may or may not do a lot depending on how you choose to use them and then page four other for the sampler tracks are sample editing functions so things like start and and the pitch envelope anyway my advice or tip is just turn on advanced mode and get to know these it's not that hard another important Global setting I don't always change this cuz I don't mind having only three patterns but by default you only have access to three patterns across the different tracks a long press can unlock three additional patterns per track so now you've got six and this is a mode if you don't like this mode and you press all three and you're back to only three patterns per track and then another thing that I think should be the default but isn't once you load up a project any changes you make to it will be saved the minute you swap to a different project or shut crack down which could be seen as a good thing if you forget to press save but if you don't want to change any of the factory projects or the projects you worked hard on press the project button and the project key and a temporary copy will be made right below blow it I don't know why they don't just enable this by default anyway you can then go ahead and make changes to the project uh let's say change a few sounds so make a mess of things and always go back by reloading the original just don't forget to press this button otherwise the project will be saved as you messed it up so those are a few defaults I highly consider you change next tiep is nice and easy but if you miss one line in the manual you'll miss it knobs change parameters pretty slowly but if you press and turn a knob you can change parameters quickly speaking of changing parameters there are quite a few parameters you can change in the app I won't go over all of them but if I had to pick here are the top things that you can only change in the app that I think you need to know about first while the panel tells you that the two right sliders control the highpass effect and the repeater effect you can swap out both of these for other pretty interesting ones so for example in the intro/outro project I SWA this out for a cross delay which I think is kind of like a more subtle repeater so the high pass is gone here and it's pretty easy to change these in the app Effect one is this slider and effect two is this one there are a few options to choose from here all these guys so you can certainly change these two but only in the app then a second really important parameter I think you need to know about is the sample trigger value so notice this whoosh doesn't play unless I hold the note all the way through so if I wanted to sequence holding this note I'd need to First press this to sequence it then turn the all knob to extend it for as long as I'd want the note to be held a much easier way that does require the app is to press the sample button and change the type to trigger now a simple short press will trigger the entire swoosh and then the third thing that I recommend exploring in the app is all the effect parameters by default you can only control one or a few more which I'll show you in a bit but there are way more parameters often more than one page of parameters for many of the effects which can dramatically change the sound for example delay times feedback feedback damping and then one more hidden I think interesting app only parameter I mean there are plenty of sound design options for the DX synths which I won't cover now so you get the entire synth experience here but for the awm2 synths you don't get everything that you get say for example in a montage or mod x but one interesting hidden sound design parameter is the LFO since you mostly get presets here this is probably the most dramatic way that you can impact how they sound so go into the LFO experiment with destinations or at the very least send something to the filter cut off just increase depth choose an interesting shape maybe explore different speeds and you can get a dramatic change in the sound with a bit of an LFO next tip or trick while there is only one sampler track so you can't load Factory or user samples into the drum tracks the sampler track is polyphonic so we could say sequence this one here and then add maybe some birds here here and each will kind of be like its own independent track and you can do that for each of the seven samples they all share the same track length and the same single effect so it would still be nice to get user samples here but still not too shabby it's kind of like not an 11 Track synth but perhaps a 17 track sequencer with polyic sequencing on the sampler track let's move on and talk about these three strips they do way more than the panel would have you believe so we already talked about the fact that this is not necessarily A highpass and repeater and this can either control the effects level for the master or for the track for the single track effect but there are quite a few more things that these can control so if you press this button under the effects level you'll see this has two pages the default is this first page the second page swaps these out from controlling Master parameter Master effects parameters to additional effect parameters for this effect so you can see the master effects aren't no longer changing but if I hit this you'll see that we're controlling basically three parameters with these within whatever effect I chose here now you may ask what if I don't like what these three control luckily there's the map button here you can remap each of these strips to control a different parameter so let's say I wanted this middle strip to control diffus diffusion then it now controls diffusion so I think it's important to know that if only for the fact that if you change this setting these will no longer control what you expect them to do if you're on page two here and then the functionality of these strips changes yet again if you're in mixer mode so to enter mixer mode you hit all and Volume Plus now as you may know in mixer mode these knobs have four different uses they either control pan volume Reverb or DeLay So when you're in pan in volume mode these sliders will behave as you'd expect them to but as long as you're in the mixer if you press Reverb or delay the sliders will now control those parameters now I don't know why the guey doesn't update but if we go into Master you'll see that I need to go into the send effects Reverb see now I'm controlling this and if I go into delay mixer mode back to master back to send and delay we're now controlling the delay I think there's a bug here the screen doesn't update and if you go into page two then you can control two additional delay or Reverb parameters these two as well in page two so all this to say these can control a lot of things depending on whether you're in effects page one or two whether you're in the mixer or not so just be aware of that okay moving on a totally different tip a powerful creative feature of seek track is the ability to create your own chords and program them in a chord Bank of up to seven chords these chords can trigger up to four notes which you can see by the way in all and keyboard mode now there's one thing I found particularly confusing about this you can edit these chords so if you hit all and a chord then you can now swap out notes and swap them in so clearly a useful feature but as I was exploring ing these I found that sometimes I could delete notes but not add them even though you can add up to four notes per chord and that's because you have to be in the octave that the note is playing in order to erase it or change it so that one note was in a different octave and if I want to remove these I now can remove these and then go to a different octave maybe say a lower one and add three different notes to this chord so chord mode is a ton of fun just make sure you're in the right octave to change the notes another chord mode tip is that the chords are different per synth you got to move into chord mode of course with that so this chord is different than this chord and this chord of course this needs to be in chord mode as well maybe not the best sound for a chord but a different chord nonetheless so the chord Banks aren't just seven but seven per track and then and another final nice feature of chords is that they work with the arpeggiator too I think this is a really great way to explore harmonies and Melodies and you can explore chords with scales all of which I think are very powerful composition Tools in seek track next a quick tip you can obviously use the play button to start and stop patterns but a faster way I think is just to hit record you'll be in record mode but then you can always hit record twice to start a pattern without record on next tip there are plenty of shortcuts in here my favorite shortcut though is the favorite shortcut so as you're going through sounds and you'll be doing this a lot because there are plenty of good presets in here if you find a sound you like you can favorite it by holding all and pressing the sound button so this is a great way to browse through sounds guilt-free if you find something you like just add that as well add that to favorites this also saves any sound design options you added to this so let's say for example I want to mess with theq a bit add delay in the Reverb and I'll save that as a favorite now as you may or may not know you access favorites by holding sound and choosing one of the banks in this case the favorites bank so now I can scroll through my three saved favorites and again favorites are entire sounds saved with sound design parameters one thing that could Reign on the favorites parade if you go into the packs which are quite lovely and let's maybe load up a few sounds which is nice that this works wirelessly I did have this crash once or twice but uh seems to be working so far anyway let's settle for these if I now go into the project and scroll through my favorites which are here you can see that there are quite a few new sounds here and if we look at the guy and I'll go into favorites here the favorites Bank you'll see that these have been added as favorites by default and you need to uncheck them for them not to be included in the favorites that you scroll through so I think they should change that but if they don't now you know one more bonus shortcut if you hit record sample and Volume Plus this becomes an LED meter that will show you incoming levels things don't clip much with the mic but if you use the audio input they might so make sure it to set your gain appropriately and then a final tip regarding the visualizer it's fun and easy to use and there are a bunch of nice Factory presets but at least as of the current version you can't import a visualizer file you made on the computer app into the phone app so learn from me if you want to make an augmented reality video don't spend time creating a setup on your computer do it on your phone okay let's talk about pros and cons for seek track on the pros side the price I think is very competitive considering what you get individual comparisons to competitors would make this video very long so instead I'll just mention strengths and weaknesses compared to other instruments in the ballpark price including the SP 44 Mark II the EP 133 and opz from teenage engineering circuit tracks and Rhythm sonicware sample track electron model samples and Cycles poly and play the original the corg elect drives and of course an iPad with a Groove box or sampling app so Pros for SE track compared to some but not all its competitors are the fact that it has both a sample-based engine and synths based on yamaha's awm2 and FM engines which sound excellent in my opinion and then it's got almost 500 free megabytes these are both for sounds and for samples but sounds don't seem to take up much space so about 500 megabytes for samples which is quite a lot many but not all of its competitors have 64 mbytes or less but note that samples can only be 16 seconds long here then for its size it's got tons of Hands-On controls I'm not sure buttons on the side is a trend that I want to see happening but regardless the end result is even more Hands-On controls which is a good thing beyond that you can sample into this as opposed to some of its competitors that can only play back samples and it's got a built-in rechargeable battery which is working quite nicely so far the biggest Pro I think is that it's just fun to use and get going so all those are considerable Pros on the cons side a few things to keep in mind if you're using this with the app with your phone or a computer it's Heaven it's easy to use but there's no screen built in so if you don't want to pair it there are many features you won't be able to access and quite a few shortcuts you'll need to memorize or parameters that the sliders and knobs control where it's not quite clear what it is you're controlling unless you know what you're doing same goes for sound names or the sound categories if the app isn't around things can seem pretty opaque initially then the second thing I think is important is that the keys aren't velocity sensitive they're fairly small and certainly not performance oriented the chord mode and the arpeggiator somewhat compensate for this but many of the Sounds here respond beautifully to Velocity so pairing this with an external MIDI controller even if it's a small one is highly recommended then third while this can play yamaha's awm2 sounds you don't have access to the entire awm2 sound engine surely not on seek trck but also not using the companion app so you're limited to presets and obviously the internal sound design tools which I talked about and the LFO but still unlike the DX engine which does give you a lot of access for the awm2 sounds you're pretty limited compared to what this engine can do the fourth thing I think you need to be aware of is the non-standard midi Port using a proprietary dongle the dongle is bundled but if you lose it there's no midi for you unless you of course use the workarounds that I showed you earlier in this video using USB then the fifth big thing I think you should know is that there's no multirack export or multirack USB support So if you want stems to mix a track on a computer you'll need to record these one by one then there are a few things that hopefully will be addressed on the firmware side despite the fact that you get seven tracks on the sampler track it would be nice to load them up onto the drum tracks it would be even better if you could program your awm2 sounds say on a modx or montage and import them into here so you could import multi samples into the synth engines that would make this quite impressive other things I'd love to see would be the ability to sequence the drum tracks using this chromatic keyboard so that you don't need to connect a midi controller other things some competitors have are more than six patterns per track more than eight projects stored on board More Sample editing tools support for time stretching and support for longer samples especially since relatively speaking there's a lot of storage in here so that's it for seek track I'll post a download to my intro/outro project and a shortcut cheat sheet on patreon along with my ever expanding book of electronic music ideas tips and tricks hit like if this was useful ring the YouTube Bell below if you want to make sure you don't miss the next one thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: loopop

Views: 78,397

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Id: Rtnekxm4cHs

Length: 29min 3sec (1743 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024