We have been wrestling with the sequencer concept for a very long time now. Hardware sequencers were always kind of a let-down in terms of how far you could go musically. We'd always have to use several sequencers to sequence (modulate) another sequencer. And so they remained just little 'rough idea' machines. At the other end, larger, super powerful hardware sequencers had the power to take a rough idea and go much farther in terms of phrasing and arrangement, however, they were not so fun to use - we found it faster to 'edit' these sequences in a DAW with clicky mouse - *a lot* faster. And if they weren't immediate or fun, then why not just do it in the DAW?
Our sequencer history started with a sequential switch, then into a few years of a huge, DAW replacement sequencer with arranging capability, tons of outputs, MIDI, etc. But this sequencer, while having some very powerful concepts and better editing paradigms, still didn't sit right with us. It wasn't quite fun or inspiring enough - which is what we really loved in our favourite hardware sequencers, despite their 'make a full song' inabilities.
Recently, we found ourselves trying to find suitable sequencers for our 'Elephant Rig' and kinda came up short. So we went back to the drawing board, programmed up several Max plugins, and challenged ourselves to come up with the most musically inspiring and *fun* sequencer concept that we could. And so recently, we hit a special moment where it all came together musically - it made sense and all of the features complemented each other perfectly. So much so that we decided to immediately start development of our own hardware sequencer.
It will be released for Euro as a perfectly WYSIWYG machine to retain 100% immediacy (which is a main point of modular). We currently have it planned with an expander which adds more 'digitally' kinds of things like MIDI, a clocking system, quantisation, USB, 'hidden modes', etc...
We are also investigating releasing it as a standalone machine a bit later with some more DAW friendly features and more 'savey' kinds of things suitable for folks who want to use it outside of the modular environment.
We'll post some teasers and fun updates as we go!