Sequence and Arrange with unusual workstations
Ways to arrange, compose and sequence sound. Some can stray into the sound design territory but generally these are the things I can open to try and layer some sounds together to find something new inside.
This is list I think I will keep coming back to, for inspiration and for memory jogging.
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Renoise The legend, my angel, where is all started for me as a teenager (along with Cool Edit Pro). The first software I bought, although I managed with the demo for years. Still the best thing to program drums in for me. So maybe quirks and interesting ways of programming with it, and lots of interesting tools built by the community. I now usually with arrange music in Ableton (no point linking to that, you know already)... But I have never managed to make the drum grooves I like with Ableton.
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SunVox Tracker, but also kind of modular... Basically runs on nearly everything. I'm trying to learn it on my ipad (maybe a mini is too small for this) but I have blasted through 3 hours flights just playing with Sunvox. Kind of makes me feel like I have no idea how to make music half of the time but sometimes I can end up with some interesting accidents.
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Blockhead An unusual approach to a DAW. Very fun to layer sampled sounds up with and create unquantised sequences.
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Anukari Midi sequencers based on game engine physics.
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Five12 Numerology I love this program. I am keeping an old mac mini around partially to make sure I have something to run it on if it stops development. It's just step sequencers upon step sequencers. It's so cool to sequence some chords, then from those sequencers basslines or melodies being drawn out from these with randomisation and automatically evolving patterns.
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Sound Trajectory I don't even own this and I don't have much use for it's 3D sound potential as I would use other object based software solutions. I still remember it periodically because I like the GUI.
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Noemi It could be a DAW, it could be a sequencer... Very open modular environment.