Doepfer Dark Time Sequencer - Manual (Page 24)

Dark time DOEPFER Nuts and bolds of sequencing
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4.2.1. Squeezing more music out of eight notes
When working with a step sequencer, it would be a wise move to get rid of old-fashioned ways of song-
writing and all theory of melody and harmony first. The step sequencer is made for tactile and sensual
experience and hands-on experimentation. What might seem to be quite abstract and technical at first sight
will soon become very special qualities in their own right – far removed from traditional keys and notes. And
that’s what it’s all about: You will get musical results that would not have been possible by the use of
traditional ways of songwriting on a ”real” (read: „traditional“) instrument, a piece of sheet music or even a
computer. The desired repetitive elements, the subtle evolution within patterns, and finally the equality of
melody and timbre will come into being almost automatically.
This opens up one more important perspective – the somewhat ”technical” and apparently ”unmusical” in-
terface of a step sequencer gives you direct hands-on access to each step of the pattern. A device like Dark
Time enables the artist to interact with musical patterns in many ways by just hitting one or two controls or
flicking a switch. No need to mess around with a mouse, editing-windows, and QWERTY keyboards.
Apart from that, you are always free to record a rocking pattern into your computer sequencer in order to
use it as a part of a bigger composition and to free up Dark Time for creating new and even more rocking
patterns.
Another interesting aspect is the fact that you cannot only use your step sequencer to control pitch but also
the parameters of a sound of an external synthesizer in the same intuitive way– e.g. the cutoff frequency of
its filter. Dark Time’s ”Range” switch produces all voltage ranges that are useful in conjunction with analog
synthesizers.
Dark Time is capable of addressing two registers of eight steps each in parallel. So two parameters of a
sound can be accessed independently, e.g. pitch and filter frequency, volume and timbre etc. Now let two
registers run against each other or one of them controlled randomly, play with the jump function and so on.
The sequencer will become a pattern-based sound generator!