Midiphy midibox seq v4+ Sequencer

Nearly impossible to find for sale. You can only build these from kits. The base kit costs about $1000 before tariffs (imported from Germany), then you have to purchase a couple of hundred dollars more in parts, then you have to put it all together, which involves 13 circuit boards with surface mount components. Took me 3 months of weekends to put it together and make it all work, including re-ordering and rebuilding two boards which broke when separated.

At the end you get one of the most powerful sequencers imaginable (and it is open source), in a compact 3U rack mount format. 16 tracks of up to 256 steps. Each step can have up to 8 Boolean "trigger" lanes, and up to 16 multi-valued "parameter" lanes (things like pitch, velocity, chord, CCs). You get to pick what lanes you want; there are 17 possibilities for parameter lanes (e.g. you could go for 3 pitch, 4 CC, and 9 others).

The workflow is reminiscent of the BeatStep, but of course much more powerful. Pick a track and a lane, then use the 16 encoders to modify the values at each step. There are also "bus" tracks that can feed into other tracks. E.g. you could have a track with chords controlling pads, then feed that in to another track for arpeggiation. There are MIDI effects, pattern groups, songs, instrument definitions, ...

The Seq is famed for its tight timing in controlling a studio full of gear. You have 4 DIN MIDI In ports, 8 DIN MIDI outs, 4 virtual USB MIDI ports, and there are expansion ports to go beyond that. Of course there is CV as well. And it is all powered from USB.

More details on the lanes below (there's a lot more to it than just this, but it gives you an idea of the control you have at each step). The trigger layers are:

- Gate on/off (if off, treated as an empty step regardless of the other layer values)

- Accent - use velocity 127

- Roll - double the note; ignored if sustain setting in MODE is on.

- Glide/Portamento - glide to next step

- Skip - jump to next step. This takes zero time and affects the track length, so is different to gate, which is like a rest.

- Random Gate - play with 50% chance

- Random Value - randomize the note within one octave up/down

- No Fx - disable effects like echo, humanizer and limiter for that step

- Roll Gate - a way to quickly enable/disable Roll/Roll2 parameters without setting them off.

The parameter layers are some combination of:

- Note (pitch). For polyphony, multiple note layers are used; however, these share trigger layers, so for broken chords, multiple tracks would be needed.

- Velocity

- Gate length (duration) - expressed as a percentage. The max is GLD(glide) which will play until the next step with a note. There is separately a sustain mode that can be enabled that will glide all notes by default.

- Chord - play chords of up to 4 notes. Note that this and Chrd2 are used in place of Note layers on chord tracks.

- Chrd2 - play chords of up to 6 notes

- MIDI CC (for parameters like filter cutoff, resonance, etc.)

- Program Change

- Pitch Bend

- Delay - microtiming. A delay from 1 to 96 microticks.

- Nth1 - do action every Nth bar, starting now

- Nth2 - do action every Nth bar, starting on the Nth bar. The actions are 'Pl' (play), 'Mu' (mute), 'Ac' (accent), 'Ro' (roll), 'Fx' (enable FX), 'Nx' (disable FX)

- Root - change scale root note. Default is 'Glb' (use global root). The setting on the Root layer overrides the global root setting for each step in the track where the value is other than “Glb”. The track using a Root layer must be in Normal mode, not in Transpose or Arpeggiator mode (MENU + MODE). This can be useful to use along with Chord layer to change the chord.

- Scale - change scale type. Default is 'Glb' (use global scale).

- Aftertouch

- Probability - 0-100%

- Roll - number of notes played, their relative intensity (0-15, with 15 being 100%) and whether the intensity is ascending (U) or descending (D).

- Roll2 - play step 2 to 5 times, with the value controlling the delay between each hit in microticks (96 per step).