Technically speaking, the synth was made up of four punch paper vari-speed rolls, which controlled the timbre, envelope, pitch and volume of 20 oscillators. The machine was equipped with an in-built vocoder and was capable of spanning seven octaves. Nothing quite like this had been seen before. The vocoder evolved further in 1959 when German engineers Helmut Klein and W.Schaaf created the Siemens Synthesiser at the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music. The contraption allowed users to speak into a microphone and hear a degraded copy of their voice which could easily be sent as a simpler telecommunication, reserving precious bandwidth for other needs during the conflict. Bell Labs scientist Homer Dudley first experimented with degrading audio quality using his newly assembled vocoder. The vocoder was first conceived on the cusp of the second world war when sending high-quality voice via transmission consumed a large amount of bandwidth. And, while most people think of artists like Daft Punk and Zedd when we talk about vocoders, this creative tool was created out of military necessity. Further tricks include using the LFO Tool to draw LFO shapes into the Event Editor of the Piano Roll window and using the Claw Machine to modify existing MIDI parts to create new variations easily.Revolutionary since its invention in 1938, the vocoder has miraculously granted all the power to sing, and has become a staple of the electronic musician’s sound-mangling toolset. It’s also possible by clicking on a generator’s name in the step sequencer list to reassign any MIDI pattern to play any instrument, or indeed to clone it and duplicate the pattern using a second generator, perhaps tweaking the pattern to create some variation as you do so. The Piano Roll editor has other talents too, letting you draw in slide and portamento data as well as slicing up notes in the grid. Right click on this and you reveal the different parameters that can be set here, including note pan, velocity and pitch, and channel volume, pitch and pan. New notes can be drawn in of course, and along the base of this window you will find a controller lane.

The Tools menu, accessible by clicking at the top left corner of the editor window, contains lots of handy features including articulations, quantizing and chopping, and shortcuts to create flam, strum and other effects as well as scaling levels and introducing randomization to a part. Once MIDI is inside the Piano Roll editor, you can work with it in many different ways.

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