Not all musicians are the same, so why should they want to use the same sequencer. Ian Waugh finds a fresh approach to sequencing in Mark of the Unicorn's Freestyle for Mac.

There's a lot of activity in the budget-priced sequencer market. Not everyone can afford – or needs – one of the £300-400 top-of-the-range jobbies, so it makes sense for sequencer developers to produce a budget range. Most such programs, however, are simply cut-down versions of their bigger brothers, so it's very interesting to see Mark of the Unicorn's FreeStyle.

MOTU's premier program is Performer (reviewed in the February issue), and it was one of the very first professional sequencers to appear on the Mac. FreeStyle is nothing like it, although a few windows, albeit mostly hidden behind several options, have the distinctive Performer layout.

No, FreeStyle is something completely different – a trackless sequencer. In fact, not only does it have no tracks, it lets you blissfully ignore such things as MIDI channels and program change numbers.

Okay, so there is a small catch – there's a bit of setting up to do before you start using the program. However, the object of the exercise is not to hide these things from you completely, but to remove the distraction of tracks and MIDI channel assignments from the creative music-making process.

Interrogation

Let's start at the beginning. When you first launch FreeStyle, you should have your MIDI interface installed, and your sound modules connected. FreeStyle interrogates the devices, so it knows what you're working with. It has a list of over 250 devices including samplers and effects units. If you have something different, it's fairly easy to add this to the list.

Now that we've got that sorted out, let's make some music. Instead of tracks, patterns and MIDI channels, FreeStyle uses Ensembles, Players, Takes, Arrangements, Sections and Songs – terms all musicians will recognise. The first step is to select a suitable Ensemble. These are simply collections of sounds or Players, and there are 14 ready-made Ensembles to chose from, including Rock Band, String Quartet, Big Band, Synth Ensemble, Orchestra and Jazz Combo.

The Players in the Rock Band, for example, consist of Horns, Guitar, Organ, Piano, Bass and Drums. Each Player has an associated sound selected from one of your MIDI devices. MIDI channels? Program numbers? The set up routine takes care of all that. You can, of course, create your own Ensembles, and add and remove Players from existing ones.

You can select a different sound for any of the players from a pop up menu, which lists the instruments you have and the sounds they contain. It's dead easy. You can also adjust the volume and pan position, using neat graphic sliders.

Sectioned off

Now that you have your band, the next step is to record some music. FreeStyle likes you to work in sections, but you don't have to, at least not all the time. A section will typically be an intro, verse or chorus, although it could be something as short as a one-bar arpeggio, or as long as the complete song.

As soon as you've selected your Ensemble, you're ready to record a section. The main screen you work with is the edit screen, and you can flip between a grid editor and a score editor. Each Player appears in the grid editor as a different colour, and has its own stave in the score editor. If the grid editor gets too busy – as it can do when several players are active – you can hide certain ones.

Let's say you want to record a four-bar intro. Set a four bar section to loop, and click on record. Click, click, click, goes the metronome. Well, it can, but even here FreeStyle is trying to bring out the creativity in you. Instead of a click you can use drum riffs. There are over 30 to choose from, and you can easily create your own.

This is such a good idea, it really helps you get into the mood of the music you are writing. I know several people who record a drum track, which they can follow during recording for just that reason.

You can tell FreeStyle to wait for the first note before starting recording, in which case it will loop around the first bar until you hit a key. However, if you play just before the first bar, the program will recognise this as a pick up and put it into the music. The Smooth Record Loop option will play pick up notes occurring before the loop, just before the loop repeats, so the music is not interrupted. Really neat.

Take five

Select one of the Players and record a Take. If you are in loop mode, the Section will loop when you've finished. But, as may often be the case, what happens if you're not quite happy with the recording? Select another track or pattern, assign it to a MIDI channel and program number? Not with FreeStyle. You simply record another take: As many as you like. It remembers them all, and you can select the best later on. Select the other Players and record in similar fashion, until the Section is complete. That's the intro, now for the verse.

We need another Section for this, so select one from the Song menu, name it, and you can start recording again. The editors only show one section at a time. And so you carry on recording chorus, middle eight, solo and end Sections.

Next stop is the Arrangement window, where you link them together. The Sections you've created appear in a list on the left. To put them in the song, you just drag them over to the grid on the right.

Yes, it is a little like pattern-based recording, but each section is a self-contained entity containing all the players used in that piece of the music, rather than simply holding individual music lines. A pattern-based system may be more flexible, but this is certainly easier.

If you've used a pattern-based sequencer, you will be aware of the problem of pick up notes. It's usually easiest to work with complete bars rather than parts of a bar, and it can be a bit of a job getting pick up notes to play in the correct place. Each section in FreeStyle has a pick up and an overlap bar, which enables you to line up the sections to the nearest bar, while ensuring that the tops and tails still play.

What happens if you want to record a music line which runs across two or more sections? No problem. Select the Follow Song function, and you can record into several sections as the music plays.

Friendly

In its efforts to be as musician-friendly as possible, FreeStyle lets you control virtually all of the recording functions from your MIDI keyboard. You press down a cluster of three keys – this will usually be quite safe unless you're recording Stockhausen – and then another key. So during your bout of musical creativity, you don't even have to touch the computer.

The program has several edit features, including Quantisation. There is no partial quantise function, but there is a swing setting which gives a shuffle feel to a recording.

You can edit notes in the grid and score editors, by clicking and dragging with the mouse. You can also insert notes in step time using the Brush tool, selecting note durations from a pop up menu. The controller editor (below the grid editor), shows controller data as vertical bars. Here you can edit note velocities, draw in volume curves and so on.

Text can also be added to the notation in the Score Editor, but there are no music symbols. You can print the score complete, and print out individual parts. If one of the Players is a transposing instrument, the program will automatically select the correct stave for it. Nice.

But there are a few omissions. For example, there's no event editor. You may not need it very often, but it's useful to be able to get in there among the bits and bytes of MIDI data on occasion. The program doesn't directly support Sys Ex messages either, which could limit the more advanced musician.

It can load Standard MIDI Files, but only Format 1, in which each MIDI channel is on a different track. Some third-party MIDI file companies only supply Format 0 files, relying on a sequencer's ability to split the track by MIDI channel, if the user wants to edit the data.

Perhaps even more irritating is the fact that the program will ignore a program change in the middle of a track, and all tempo instructions apart from the first one. I find it very hard to understand how MOTU can justify this. It's not only classical music which has tempo changes. Perhaps an update will fix it.

Verdict

Where the program does get full marks is in musician-friendliness. The manual is excellent, and is even printed in colour. Yes, presentation does make a difference. I can't recall any other sequencer manual in colour, although I'm sure someone will let us know if there is one. You also get a one-hour tutorial video, and this really is excellent, too.

Bearing in mind its limitations – and I'm sure they won't worry a lot of potential buyers – FreeStyle suits the newcomer to sequencing, and even the more experienced musician who has never been happy with the computer approach to sequencing. It's probably as musician-friendly as a sequencer can get, and well worth exploring if you don't want or need one of the big boys. Full marks to MOTU for innovation.