My Sequencer

  I use Winjammer Pro. No doubt other programs, like Cakewalk, are superior to Winjammer, in various ways, perhaps simply by having many more features in each window or view. Perhaps in other ways, like flexibility or ease of use, clean initial installation, Winjammer might be preferable. In any case, this is meant only to give a sense of what a complete sequencer looks like, and how it works. For the fullest feature set, it would seem more likely that there is no substitute for programs designed and dedicated just for that purpose, such as notation programs, conversion programs, and others mentioned already; it just might be a rather expensive option.

  Just the track view, from before. It shows something called, port. It's just all 1s, here. But it could be 2, 3, whatever. Each port can go to a different synth, which is great. If you use the daughtercard set-up that I have, that implies an FM card that it's hooked to. FM could be port #2. Channels/tracks playing out port #1 could be going to the wavetable, to the GS/Roland. You could have 32 instruments instead of just 16, at a time. 16 could play out the wavetable. 16 could play out the FM card, in the same song. Of course, the FM sounds are awful, but you get the idea.

  The little check marks are just the mute indicator. You check or uncheck however many at a time you want. It mutes that track, or those tracks. Doesn't play. It's really a great way to just isolate on particular tracks, say work on the drums and bass together, with nothing else, or come up with a solo against just the bass or something. If a song's well produced, it can be enjoyable to literally just listen to parts all the way through, instead of the whole thing. Just mute out certain tracks.

  The time and events show just how long the notes and controllers run, from start to finish per track, and event just the sum of all notes, controllers, SysEx strings, whatever. Gives you an idea of how much stuff you've got on the track. If it starts showing numbers like 10-15,000, you could be in trouble; probably just an excessive number of pitch bend, expression, or whatever sort of controllers (unlikely to be just a lot of notes).

  There's a couple of things you can do to the entire track, or select a bunch of tracks, and change 'em all in the same way. It won't exactly look like this picture, which has been 'fixed up', but these are some of the items on the drop-down menu under, Track.

  This sequencer, Winjammer Pro, will show a few other options than this, but these seems the most useful.

• The Quantize, Humanize, Swing and Patterns can be used to change the position, timing, of various notes you select, or even just for the whole track, Humanize sort gives a sort of 'live' feel to a line. Quantize helps to get your notes 'on the beat', if recorded live; though this sequencer won't adjust the controllers associated with a note.
• The Split is that feature that allows you to convert between Type 0 and Type 1 SMF. You split out a type 0 by channel (you can split other ways, too, say just to split a track with high notes kept, and low notes below a certain point, placed in a new track - for ex). This sequencer can't split out by track, so it puts the stuff playing out a particular channel all in one track.
• And you get it back to Type 0 by just merging all the tracks into one, specifically into track 0. Or you can just merge one track into another, maybe combine the drum parts when you're done into a single track.
• Thinning controllers is useful if you crammed too many onto a track. Maybe the pitch bends don't have to come so close together. You can thin them out, and get that Events number down a bit.
• The Filter events is basically a way to strip out controllers. You can use Split to put just all of a certain type of controller out onto another track, and isolate it. But let's say there was some mix up and needless controller values were accidentally recorded all along the track. This is just a way to quickly clean them out of there.
• And the Slide is a way to move everything, even in every track, back or forward a bit. You could also use the measure or song window, mentioned further on, to insert entire blank measures. But if the bit you want to slide forward say, isn't right on the first beat of the measure, this is pretty handy.

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