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There are numerous amounts of sequencers on the market. When it comes to the essentials, there aren't many differences between the features of each, just the layouts, shortcuts and methods may differ, but once you understand the concept of the functions of the various software poackages then you can pretty much use all of them. I will say though that there are some that are less expensive that won't allow all of the features of the 'big players'. If you're going to work from a PC then Cakewalk is probably the only real choice for sequencing. However, the majority of the software is written for Apple computers and if you want to be familiar with the industry of film scoring I would highly recommend working in the Apple environemt.
When I started off years ago, I began scoring on Cubase but as I progressed into more advanced techniques I moved over to Digital Performer (DP) as it was the software designed more towards film scoring rather than just general music production. I also had dialogue with MOTU to suggest some additions that they could make to DP that would help advance the needs of the film composer and consequently we now have facilities to calculate click tempos and also streamers for free timing in the movie window. For those reasons I chose to stick with DP and so far have not found a reason to change so naturally I would recommend Digital Performer 5 to anyone wanting to get into film scoring.
It will be impossible for me to mention all of the features of a sequencer. When you buy the software you also receive a manual of around 700 pages. What I want to do is give you some specific tips about the setting up on the environment if you're new to sequencing and also a few other handy tools for everyone to use. In all of the following examples I will be using DP5 in the illustrations and explainations, but I am confident that if the features exist in your own chosen sequencer the methods will be very similar.
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