Why a MIDI Sequencer?
Electronic music has been a hobby of mine for several years now, and the final project for EE476 gave me a great opportunity to design my own piece of gear. The one thing I do not own is a hardware sequencer for my MIDI equipment, so I decided to build one. My goal was to create a sequencer that is basic, yet has enough functionality to be useful, and not just an academic exercise. Because of hardware contstraints, I decided to build something that was more of a “sketchpad” for musical ideas with several basic functions that could be used with ease. This is something that is fairly unique in the world of MIDI sequencers, which generally tend to try to pack in as many functions as possible, resulting in a complex user interface using multiple menus, and requiring many button-pushes just to perform simple editing functions. The scope of this project would have prevented me from attempting a professional MIDI sequencer like this, but that would not have been my goal anyhow, since it is po