I know it’s hard to explain easily so let’s do it like this. Most beat makers start at a 4/4 with 1/16th quantizing default. This means that for every bar of music, the bar is split up into 4 small pieces, and in each of those 4 pieces, there are 4 slots open to drop sounds into the grid jili casino online.
So one bar has room for 16 sounds (4/4 at 1/16th) that are played in ‘sequence’ one after the next along a time line. If you filled up all 16 slots you’d simply have a machine gun sounding repetition. If you place a sound in every fourth slot, you’d get a house music thump (assuming you used a drum sound)…
Now picture one of these ‘bars’ sitting on a stack of 16 layers of bars in an interface where you control each layer and bar, and they all overlap each other.
So each layer has its own 16 slots per bar – and each layer has its own sound. One layer can be a kick drum, and the next layer can be a snare or a high hat.
Now imagine if on each of those 16 layers you can open up a separate panel where you get 10 more layers for the bar, this is commonly known as a drum kit, where there are a collection of 10 (or more/less as it ranges) ) per software) sounds that compliment each other well.
This drum kit is one bar, on one layer, but it has 10 layers within it – so in total you have 16 slots going horizontally (1/16th quantizing), and 10 layers going vertically (10 sounds per kit). That gives you a grid of 160 spots to place sounds, and when you arrange them right, and choose a proper tempo, you can achieve pretty much any music you want with drum kits.
Now picture the 10 drum sounds being OTHER sounds, not drums but voice effects, alarms, samples, quick scratches, beatbox sounds, etc. You can start to see how versatile this grid pattern can be.
In case that confused you here’s a recap – you have 16 layers in your main interface. On each layer you place a bar, in each bar you have 10 more layers.
The main interface simply acts as a shell for most sequencers, and once you place a bar into any layer, and assign your kit, that’s when you open your drum or instrument panel and start to make your patterns.
So technically, if you filled up all 16 layers with drum kits, you have 160 layers to work with. It would sound like MUD if you did this without being smart with your patterns, however that shows you the possibilities of just the drum kit layers.
Sequencers also utilize keyboard simulation, where instead of having a ‘kit’ with 10 sounds/layers, your ‘bar’ opens up a keyboard panel and this time you have 16 slots, and 4 octaves to work with.
Mathematically this is huge, and the grid turns into 12 x 4 (12 keys per octave, 4 octaves) = 48 keys x 16 (1/16th quantizing = 16 spots per note) = 768 spots on your grid for ONE just alone. Again this is with the grid going 16 spots horizontally, and now 48 spots vertically with one note scale per each of the 48 ‘layers’.
With sequencers you can usually draw in 2 bars at a time, or 4 or 8 or as many as you want, and when you open the panel the grid will look insane and not be easy to work with.