I downloaded this and played around with it a little.<p>I’m a little skeptical of something that ditches traditional music notation for piano roll, doesn’t offer any ways to reorganize sections of your song, and then gives you a bunch of tools for key signatures, modes, polymeter, and microtonal music. I’m trying to think of a programming analogy—it’s like checking out a new programming language that has dependent types, higher-kinded types and monads, and a borrow checker, but no strings or integers.<p>It’s really easy for those of us with analytical, mathematical minds to go diving into the more esoteric parts of music theory. Set theory, microtonality and alternative tuning systems, esoteric scales and cataloging all these different scales—but then you fuck up the basics or miss them completely. I noticed that the “major” scale is only available under its more esoteric name, the “ionian” scale, and then there are five different versions of locrian to choose from, not counting the ones outside 12-EDO.<p><a href="https://github.com/helio-fm/helio-sequencer/blob/develop/Resources/scales.json">https://github.com/helio-fm/helio-sequencer/blob/develop/Res...</a><p>Even with all these esoteric features, there is no such thing as, say, Eb. There is only D#. As programmers, we really want to normalize all our data so that it’s represented in exactly one way, but as a musician I like having both sharps and flats around. They’re convenient and make the music easier to read.<p>This is a neat tool for playing around with scales and tunings, but it seems like absolute hell to try and write music this way.
This is really cool, thanks for sharing!<p>Also, slightly off topic, but the YouTube channel[0] linked on the footer has some very interesting 19edo music. Although I was aware of microtonality, I had never checked it out. It sounds unstandard yet amazing<p>[0] <a href="https://youtube.com/@peterrudenko" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/@peterrudenko</a>
Cool, I'll give it a try! I think these kind of sequencers can be really powerful, but as always the effectiveness of the tool depends on the ability of the wielder.<p>I link to some other software in this category below. It is nice to have an open source alternative.<p>--<p><a href="https://mixedinkey.com/captain-plugins/" rel="nofollow">https://mixedinkey.com/captain-plugins/</a><p><a href="https://www.orbplugins.com/orb-producer-suite/" rel="nofollow">https://www.orbplugins.com/orb-producer-suite/</a><p><a href="https://www.wavedna.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wavedna.com/</a><p><a href="https://www.hooktheory.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hooktheory.com/</a>
Oh, this is good!<p>I’m a bit curious; why are musicians so much against putting note names on their keyboards? It’s like having a computer keyboard with no letters marked on top.