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This includes the usual (major, minor, dorian, etc.) as well a user-designed scale, and switching between them is as easy as holding the shift button and pressing one of the first eight pads. You don’t have the luxury of stopping transport when playing live, of course, so Arturia built in the ability to constrain notes to melodic scales. When the sequence is not running, turning an encoder previews the note for that step, and in my tests that proved to be the best way to set a sequence with a specific melody in mind. Setting notes can be tricky since there’s no visual indication on the controller itself, but Arturia provides a few useful tricks to help you along. As you’d expect, the pads toggle the 16 available steps on and off, and the encoder sets the note associated with each step. Moving on to the sequencer, here again the primary controls at hand are those pads and encoders. In essence, this limits the BeatStep controller mode to non-melodic (drum) use, which is a bit of a shame. When in standalone mode, there is no way to change the octave or scale of the notes transmitted from the pads. Unfortunately, making changes outside of the MCC application is a non-starter. These settings can be saved in any of the 16 presets available on the BeatStep and are easily recalled on the controller itself.
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The pads can be configured independently to transmit notes, MMC, switched CC and patch change commands, and the encoders can do CC and NRPN (used by all of the DSI synths). To make changes to the configuration of the controller, Arturia created the MIDI Control Center application, which lets you configure the BeatStep in pretty much any way you can imagine. The BeatStep can also output CV for the notes received on its MIDI input, which means it can act as a MIDI-to-CV converter in addition to a controller/sequencer. The encoders, on the other hand, transmit MIDI CCs to the MIDI outputs only. By default, the pads output MIDI notes to both the hardware and USB outputs, and voltage to the CV/gate outputs.
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The bulk of the layout is taken by 16 velocity- and pressure-sensitive pads sitting below 16 endless notched encoders. Therefore, it makes sense to start by talking about the controller. The sequencer functionality was added after the fact, when they realized the hardware layout they’d developed would support it. In a video on BeatStep’s origins, Glen Darcey, one of its creators, explains that it was first designed primarily as a drum pad controller using hardware found on their Spark hybrid drum machine.
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Late last month, the French music gear and software maker Arturia offered up what could be a truly disruptive force to this resurgent market when it released the BeatStep, a $99 pad controller/step-sequencer combo with both MIDI and CV capabilities. Low-end units like the Doepfer Dark Time and MFB Urzwerg cost almost $500 a piece, and high-end gear like the genoQs Octopus will set you back about as much as a small car. Until recently, this was a fairly expensive endeavor. But with the recent renaissance of analog gear, many producers are turning back toward the simplicity and immediacy of the hardware sequencer.
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Once MIDI arrived, the step sequencer took a backseat to computers and MPCs, which had more advanced capabilities. Back in the original heyday of analog synthesizers, analog step sequencers were an integral part of pretty much any studio-the kind that allowed artists like Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk to move beyond the traditional keyboard and introduce a new level of rhythmic groove to their music.