In 1987, I was just out of college and had bought my first synthesizer (an Ensoniq ESQ-1 which I still have). It came with a "sequencer", which is kind of like a tape recorder, except that the machine "records" your notes and has the synth play them back, rather than recording audio. One of the useful features of a sequencer is that one can record something at a very slow pace and then play it back at a faster speed. I tried it out with the piano track, playing it at a moderate speed, then speeding it up. The result was a bit intoxicating. The rest of the instruments were played along with the piano in real time.

When I re-recorded the organ part recently (using a better sounding organ than was available to me in 1987), there was a bit in the middle where I thought it might sound cool to play along with the piano, rather than just accompany with chords, as I had in the original. So I had to learn the piano part and hopefully play it at the insane speed. Below is a video of me recording that section.



Sequencers also have the ability to "quantize", meaning that the timing of each note can be rounded to the nearest 1/4, 1/8, 1/16th of a beat. What ensues is a "machine gun" kind of effect, where the playing is too "perfect" to be real. Back in the day, I decided to quantize only half of the song... So half of it sounds super-mechanical, and the other half sounds like an almost plausible hyper-super piano player. Another trick of technology I made use of for a couple of measures is to copy a short section of it to another sequencer track and transpose it up an octave. Thus, you briefly hear a monstrous two-handed descending then ascending octave riff that's just too perfect to be true.

I stopped using sequencers shortly after this after I got an 8-track recorder, because to my ears, sequencers don't quite play back what I play into them due to subtle timing issues. In the interest of full disclosure, the other monthly offerings that have made use of the sequencer are "When You're In Love", and "Wasted Time", which have a mixture of sequenced and audio tracks, and the intro to "It's Scott and Todd". ( "The Rebellion" made use of an arpeggiator for a couple of parts.)

I got a lot of fun out of re-visiting this nifty little number. Enjoy!

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