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Opcode Vision | |
Article from Micro Music, March 1990 |
So, who needs another sequencer for the Macintosh anyway? Mike Collins assess the chances of Opcode's latest addition to this market
Until recently the choice was between the well-established and full-featured programs such as Performer or MasterTracks Pro, or a recent newcomer to the Mac, Dr T's KCS Level II. Opcode had produced one of the earliest Mac sequencers, but had allowed it to fall well behind the others as far as features were concerned.
Southworth Systems had produced an interesting sequencer called MIDIPaint, but the company unfortunately went out of business before the program became too well established. So Dave Oppenheim with his programming partner, Ray Spears (at Opcode) decided to re-enter the affray and have designed a new sequencer which seems to provide more features than any of the others.
Vision provides both Graphic and Event List Editing, to cater for most people's preferences. Loop recording is provided to allow you to record drum-machine style, using different instruments on different MIDI channels. After loop recording, you can unmerge the resultant track to put each instrument on a different track.
Each Vision file is made up of 26 sequences which you can chain together in patterns. Each sequence can contain up to 99 tracks, so you could just use one sequence, recording separate tracks in a linear tape-recorder style, if you prefer to work this way. Or you could use several sequences chained to form a song, and then record a linear sequence to play for the length of the song. In other words, Vision allows for plenty of flexibility in your working methods. When you chain sequences together in 'song mode', they form subsequences within another sequence. There are still plenty of tracks free within this sequence to record linear tracks alongside the song.
Features, which I particularly like, include real-time track shift which allows you to shift tracks forwards or backwards in time while they are playing. The shift can be made permanent afterwards. The quantise function works in a similar way. You can select different quantize resolutions on each track as they play, and then choose permanent quantize resolutions afterwards. Vision is the only Mac sequencer which allows this nondestructive quantisation at the moment, so if this feature is important to you - get Vision!
Up to 32 faders are available which can be assigned to control a variety of functions. The fader movements can then be recorded onto any track. For instance, you could assign a fader to track shift for a specific track, and record the real-time track shifts you make. This could make for some pretty interesting feels if people start to use this feature on the next crop of sequenced records! Alternatively, you could assign the faders to MIDI Controller 7 (Volume) and record a mix of your instrument levels. I found that this worked very well in practice, although a couple of people who tried the program said they felt that the fader travel should be longer to allow really smooth fadeouts. I should mention that you can only fit about 19 of these faders onto an SE screen, because you can't scroll down the faders display - shame about that.
Vision is the first sequencer, I am aware of, which allows you to take music performed in free time, without listening to a metronome click, and stretch it around to make it match the bar lines that you figure it should do, so that you can then quantize or transcribe it. Any change you make to the relationship between the notes and the bar lines will automatically be compensated for in the tempo track, so that the piece will still perform just as you originally played it, although the bar lines will now be correctly aligned. This is not very well documented in the manual, but apparently you use the Insert Tempos to Maintain Timing option in the Scale Time function, which is accessed from the Do Menu.
If you want to be more ambitious, you could transpose a part recorded on a half-tone synthesizer for replay on a quarter-tone synth with the Scale Size feature. You can also map one drum machine to another by specifying any MIDI note to be output for each of the 128 MIDI notes on the original track! This is really neat stuff! Key Transpose lets you pick a source key and scale, and a destination key and scale, from pop-up menus in the Transpose dialog box. This is really easy to do, in practice, and again illustrates the thought that has gone into the design of Vision's user interface.
If you want all the notes you played to fall exactly into the destination scale, there is an option to Constrain To Scale. Map Transpose lets you do just about any kind of transposition imaginable! You can map any original note to any other note. You can even set the transpose scale size to numbers other than 12, to make up a 24 note scale to play on a synthesizer tuned to quarter tones for instance. Finally, you can save your Transpose Maps separately from from your Sequences in a Setup File. This allows you to use these maps with other pieces of music in the future.
All-in-all, these transposition features are very comprehensive and flexible, and should allow you to work even more creatively, especially with different drum-machines, or with differently scaled and tuned synthesizers.
- Vision's Event Selection options are the most powerful I have come across on any sequencer I have seen. You can apply a collection of various criteria to all events in the selected tracks to allow you to select only those events which meet your selection criteria. There are 5 types of criteria, including Event Time, Event Description, Instrument, Bracketing Events, and Metrical Placement. Event Time criteria let you select events which occur within specified time ranges between the Start and End Edit times. Using Event Description criteria you can select events of that type, or all events except that type.
There are 8 categories of events, plus 8 varieties of MIDI Controller. You can get even more selective at this point by specifying events with particular parameters. These parameters would include Note Number, Velocity, Release Velocity, and Duration if you choose Note events. For instance, you could say the event is a Note On event whose parameter is a particular Note Number, like C1 for a bass drum on your drum-machine. And you can specify a range of values in a variety of ways using the following selection criteria: 'is... or less', is... or more', or 'is from... thru... '. You can also use 'is not... ', 'is... or... ', or 'is not from... THRU'.
If the selected tracks have more than one Instrument amongst them, the Instruments used by those tracks are shown. In this case, you can select events on one or more specified instruments and not on others. Using Bracketing Events, you can describe two additional events which can turn on or off the selection search for events which meet other criteria. For example, this feature would allow you to select notes played with the sustain pedal down.
You can use Metrical Placement to restrict the events selected to those events which occur at some particular point within a bar, or beat. This lets you select events on the down beat, or those which are off the beat. This is very useful if you want to accent particular beats in a drum part, for instance. With the Input Map, it's possible to assign different Instruments to events coming in on different MIDI Channels, so that, for instance, you could record data on multiple MIDI channels from another sequencer in real time, and use the Input Map to set up which incoming MIDI channel becomes which MIDI Instrument inside Vision. Or you could assign different Instruments to different parts of a single MIDI keyboard, to set up split-keyboard performance and recording. Such maps are very useful if you use several different MIDI Master Keyboards, which need different input setups, and you could have a different Input Map to suit each keyboard.
In addition to assigning Instruments, you can assign Trigger Modes, or Transpose Mode to incoming MIDI channels or keyboard zones. This lets you reserve part of a keyboard for transposing playing sequences, and lets you trigger individual sequences either with a single, or range of keys, each of which transposes the sequence appropriately. Instead of having your MIDI keyboard play notes, you can have it play sequences, or transpose sequences which are already playing.
Transpose Mode causes any key to transpose all sequences which are already playing, although it won't transpose a sequence which you are recording on, because you would normally play your new notes in whatever key the sequences were transposed to.
The Trigger Modes cause any key to trigger one or more sequences - each key you press starts one copy of each sequence. The sequence is transposed according to what key you press - if you press several notes simultaneously, you will get several transposed copies of the sequence playing simultaneously. In Trigger Mode, every time you press a new individual note, the sequence will stop and restart, transposed to the new note. If you play new notes simultaneously, each one will start a simultaneous copy of the sequence.
With Continuous Trigger Mode, playing new notes won't stop old sequences - they will play throughout their entire length. If you choose Gated Mode, each sequence will play only for as long as you hold the key down. For instance, you could record a trill or arpeggio sequence, and the entire keyboard would trill or arpeggiate whenever you play it!
- The Queue feature is very useful when you are putting sequences together to form a song. If, for instance, you had 4 sequences, A, B, C, and D, but you weren't sure of the best order to play them in, you could use the Queue feature to chain these sequences together in a temporary buffer (the queue). Just click on the Queue check box in the Control Bar, and click in the Players field on the Control Bar, then type the letters D, A, D, A, B, A to link your sequences in this order. Sequence D will begin playing, then A will start when D ends, and so on till the queue of sequences has ended. The queue is lost from the buffer once you have played it through. This Queue is actually the first of 9 queue Players which you can use.
Using these Players you can play more than one sequence at a time, without going into Record mode or using subsequences. You can select the current Player either by typing the number corresponding to the Player you want on the keyboard, or by clicking on the number of the Player you want in the Control Bar. If you record using multiple Players, the resulting track will play back just as you entered the Players.
- When a chain of sequences is recorded into a Vision track, these sequences are known as Subsequences. You can just put any track into Record, and play sequences by pressing keys A to Z on the Mac, and these will be recorded into the track. Or you can use Step Record, or you can insert them using the List Editor.
In real time you can use Queue Mode, of course, which makes the process very easy, although Step recording subsequences couldn't really be simpler. The Subsequences exist in the new track as copies of the original sequences, rather than as actual MIDI data. These sequences can be easily edited in the List Editor, and you can transpose any of these subsequences here without affecting the original data, which you may be using in another place. You gain a lot of flexibility to allow you to structure your music when using these subsequences. For instance, I discovered that playing sequences simultaneously which were set to different Meters allowed me to sequence polyrhythms very effectively.You can even record various alternative performances using subsequences.
You could play the Mac keyboard to trigger sequences, or whatever, or use MIDI keys to assign the sequence play letters to your MIDI keyboard and play them there. Or you could use one of the Trigger Modes, with or without the Input Map, to trigger a different sequence from each key you hit. You might just start one sequence, and use Transpose Mode to transpose it as it plays.
In addition, you could use more than one of the Players to have several sequences playing simultaneously, and each track actually has 9 of its own Players. Whichever of these functions you use, you can record the entire performance into a track. Each of the sequences that you played during your performance becomes a subsequence in the track. Once in the track, you can edit it till you get it just the way you want it.
For anyone who likes to control their sequencer from a MIDI keyboard, Vision probably offers more versatility in this area than anything else available. Also, if you like to play around with several sequences at once, or try sequences played in different order, or quickly transpose sequences as they are playing, and simultaneously record the results of your experimentation, then Vision is for you.
The Instrument Setups are a great new idea, and I am sure that many other sequencers will follow suit and incorporate similar functions in the near future - but Vision has this now! The Players idea is a new one on me, but I can see this being a very useful feature to use from time to time. Subsequences are great! The flexibility which these allow is just amazing! I find that the realtime editing options, such as track-shift, quantise, and transposition, are extremely easy to use, and useful in practice. The List Editing and Graphic Editing features are also very comprehensive, and the equal of just about any sequencer on the market.
So what don't I like about Vision? Well it does have a tendency to crash much more often than, say, Performer, especially while carrying out some editing operations. The windows do not all re-size as neatly as those in Performer, nor do the graphics or text fonts look as pleasing to my eye as those used in Performer. And the looping options are nowhere near as good as those in Performer. The SysEx recording capability is better in Performer, and the general look and feel of Performer is somehow slicker and neater.
Now Performer version 3.21 has just added Event Chasing, which Vision had first. But Performer does allow the user to choose which types of events to chase, and lets you disable this function if you wish. When you play from some point within a sequence and Event Chasing is on, there is an annoying delay while the chasing happens, before the sequence starts. Often you do not need to chase events, because the sequence plays OK without doing so. In such cases it is doubly frustrating to have to wait. Performer has got this one right! Mark of the Unicorn have also added Sequence Chaining, and Graphic note editing, and Remote Control from your MIDI keyboard, to Performer in an attempt to match Vision's feature list.
I have used Vision for about 3 months now, and I haven't used all of its features yet. I will continue to use it in the foreseeable future. But I will also be checking out Performer 3.21, and using this for what it does best, transferring sequences between Performer and Vision using MIDIFiles, which both programs support.
I can't wait to check out Passport's Pro 4 to see if this latest Macintosh sequencer release has any advantage to offer compared with Vision or Performer. Watch this space to find out what happens next!
Product: Vision
Format: Macintosh
Price: £399
Supplier: Opcode MCMXCIX (Contact Details)
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Review by Mike Collins
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