The Yamaha SEQTRAK Mobile Music ideastation lets you document your creativity whenever and wherever inspiration strikes. The SEQTRAK is tiny enough to be packed with you at all times—it can almost slip into the inner pocket of a winter coat or be stashed in a small bag—so it’s ready to work in an instant.

A rechargeable battery provides power on the go, and a savvy three-section user interface—Drums, Synth & Sampler and Sound Design & Effects—means you can immediately document creative concepts with ease. There is nothing to get in your way or trip up your flow.

SEQTRAK carries more than 2,000 presets with more available on the included app. If you can’t find the right sound for your project—no problem. SEQTRAK makes it simple to capture, manipulate and process your own samples. Not only can you create anywhere; SEQTRAK also transforms any space into a live performance stage. Beyond playing and remixing your music, a Visualizer mode can synch images to your songs. It’s not quite the impact of the 360-degree video inside Sphere in Las Vegas, but you can still blow minds by offering a multimedia experience to your fans.

Obviously, a ton of thought went into manufacturing something so small, and yet so powerful. Here, Yamaha Synthesizer Senior Product Speicialist Blake Angelos reveals the inside story on one of the tiniest, coolest and most user-friendly music workstations on the planet.

So, the first thing I thought when I saw SEQTRAK was, “Wow, that looks different.” How an instrument looks and feels is incredibly important. Can you give us some insight to the overall design of it?

Blake Angelos: SEQTRAK evolved into something much greater than the initial idea. Initially, it was designed to be something to encourage young non-musicians, or people that may not have learned a musical instrument in a traditional way, to create music and do something with music.

Now, the developers on SEQTRAK are pretty young, hip people, and as it developed, it evolved over time into what you see today. In order to reach a young group of people, they wanted to make something that was easy to use, and that you could create music with on the fly using a step sequencer. Also, it had to be affordable.

That’s a very specific set of parameters.

Well, they went to work. To me, what they ended up with was something much greater than just that. Think about what you have. You have an instrument that has 11 tracks. Seven of those tracks are drum tracks. The additional four tracks are two AWM2 instrument tracks, a

four Operator DX-style FM synth track and a sampler with about 500MB of available sample memory.

This is a lot more than a small, portable instrument for someone to try to work out a single melody line against a drum track.

That’s right. Each of those tracks has its own EQ, its own insert effect and its own filter. So, that means that every drum of those seven drum tracks has individual EQ, individual filter, individual effects—all controllable. And the effects aren’t just a reverb, a chorus and delay. This has VCM—Virtual Circuitry Modeling—effects that include phasers, flangers and several different types of delays. It has the VCM compressor. These are technologies we have in our high-end synthesizers that they put into SEQTRAK.

And then, in the synth category, there’s more than 2,000 sounds to choose from for your two tracks. Anyone that’s familiar with MOTIF will recognize the sounds in here. You’ll see familiar names like “Sweetness,” for example, or “Full Concert Grand.” That’s the level of sound quality in SEQTRAK.

Are these sounds straight from the MOTIF family?

These are MOTIF-inspired sounds. The sounds may not have all the detail of an original MOTIF sound, but when you connect a MIDI keyboard controller, it’s a very playable synth in this little instrument. There’s a lot of horsepower here, to say nothing of the four-operator FM synthesizer that’s basically a reface DX.

Okay, so the last bit of sound generation is the sampler section. Can you tell us a bit more about how that works?

Well, you can record with the internal MEMS mic, which is a small, integrated microphone similar to the type you’d find in a mobile device. But you can also record via an Audio in, which is cool. You’ve also got USB-C, with audio and MIDI connectivity for a computer, so you can record off of stuff you find on the internet, or really anywhere on your computer for that matter. And that’s just the beginning. I haven’t even talked about the sequencing yet!

Can you tell us a little bit more about the step sequencer capabilities?

Well, it has the step sequencer onboard. You can make up to eight measures of 16 steps per measure, and there’s six patterns per part, right? Each part has its own patterns. You can have six kick drum patterns, six snare drums, six claps, etc. And then you can freely adjust them. So, you can play with six on kick and snare, or six and two, or whatever. And then you have an All button so you can switch them all at the same time. You can change it up really easy with the way this interface works.

Does it have real-time recording, or just step sequencing?

That was actually my biggest concern when I first powered it up. “Well, can you do just real-time recording?” Well, it comes with a little MIDI breakout cable, that connects to a mini jack-style connector on the right side. And then you can plug in a standard MIDI keyboard. So, you can totally turn off all the auto-quantizing and just freely record up to eight measures. Or, I can record and have it auto-quantized, so everything I play is quantized to the nearest 16th note. So, if I really want to put some cool tracks down, and make the time fixed immediately, I can do that. 

And, if you want to go deeper, you’ve got micro-timing and micro-pitch per step. You can also set up probability, which recalculates every time the pattern comes around, so you can really add a bit of indeterminacy to your sequences. It’s not always going to play the same exact loop.

There’s a lot of production options in SEQTRAK. And then to me, the whole thing all really comes together with the app.

You know, it’s funny—sometimes, when companies come out with an app, it feels like they’re doing it because they couldn’t squeeze it into the hardware. Like, “Oh, so I’ve got to download an app to get it to do the thing I expected it to do out of the box?” But, from what I’ve seen with this app, it really doesn’t feel like that.

No, it doesn’t. What this app gives you is a visual representation of everything that’s inside of the instrument. You can fully use SEQTRAK without the app—you don’t need it—everything has its own key command. The app actually has a little shortcut list, where you can click on it to interact with SEQTRAK.

One really cool thing is that SEQTRAK has Bluetooth MIDI, so there’s no table fuss. You connect it via Bluetooth and you’re good. Once you’re connected, you get real-time feedback. For example, when you touch on the kick drum button, it automatically updates on the app and shows you the kick drum parameters. It’s very, very well integrated. I was blown away by how well they did it.

Yeah. It’s a very pleasing design too, just looking at it.

It is, it’s very cool. You know, when we first released it, we didn’t know how the market would react to it. We’ve been out of this instrument category for a while, and there’s a lot of competitors out there. I was worried that people might look at this and think that it was something that it wasn’t, and that’s not at all what happened. What happened was everybody looked at it, and looked at the specifications, and then saw some of the video content and started making assessments about it immediately. And then, when people got it in their hands and they actually started, you know, using it, that’s when they realized “Oh, this is really something pretty unique and special for under 500 bucks.”

We’ve known each other for a few years now, and you come from a pretty classic “piano player” background—probably pretty far off from the customer that the development team envisioned appealing to. Can you speak to how SEQTRAK has challenged your creative process a little bit? What’s got you most excited?

Well, having a step sequencer is cool. I’ve never been that blown away by step sequencers if all they do is step sequence.

But, as soon as you start adding some of these small little adjustments to it, like the micro-timing thing, the fact that you can move something before or in front of the beat on a step-by-step level—that right there, in that workflow, changes how I’m going to create a drum part. So that’s one thing.

The other thing is working within the confines of eight measures forces me to do something cool in that constraint. But, because I have six phrases per eight measures, and I can freely adjust them, I can kind of use it like a musical Lego kit, where I can move around and combine phrases as I want.

We talked about the Bluetooth MIDI, which is cool, but we also have Wi-Fi on it for file transfer and updating the OS via the app. And there’s definitely going to be OS updates. There’s also definitely going to be content packs, that they’re going to make available via the app as well.

And the last thing that I think is cool about the app is that it’s not just iOS. It’s also Android, PC and Mac. So, we’ve covered basically everybody.

That’s great—Android users tend to get left out in a lot of audio and music production stuff.

Absolutely, so we’re pleased to be able to do it on Android.

Anything else have you particularly excited?

Well, the last thing is the visualizer—which at first, I was like, “What is this?” And then I started playing with it. The fact that I can make little videos with it and then immediately share those to social ... and the videos have kind of a Minecraft-y vibe to it a little bit. It’s pretty cool what you can do with it, and they synchronize to the music that you play. So, being able to share stuff like that …

Another thing that you can do with it is if you take the output of whatever device you’re using and put it to a projector, you can then run a projector in the background, or whatever. There’s lots of different ways that this can go. And again, every time I think about all of the things in it—2,000 sounds, 11 tracks, all these things about it—and it’s still under $500.

Which is pretty impressive.

It really is. And it has a lithium-ion battery onboard, so I can just charge it and get about three to four hours of time on it. You know, as you start to get into it and you start to work with it, it becomes remarkable.

One of the things that struck me—you mentioned, “Hey, this has got AWM2. This has got high-end Yamaha stuff in here.” It’s got an FM engine, and that has a very specific sound. But on the other opposite end of the extreme, you have the built-in mic and speaker. I don’t think anyone would argue that is a decidedly lo-fi type of experience, right? It has a certain quality to it. And I think that’s a really interesting contrast.

That lo-fi sound quality can really inspire something out of you, you know. Especially the last five-plus years, there’s been such a huge movement in “found sounds.” And to your point of the original vision of SEQTRAK being for non-musicians, what’s more exciting for a non-musician than being able to sample the world around them, right? Because everything can be a musical instrument then.

Exactly.

Whether it’s a match, you know, striking a box, whether it’s the sound of a door shutting, etc.

Yeah, in the video we released, somebody hitting a spoon on the side of a cup—it’s not a super high-fidelity thing, but then, taking it and using the lo-fi effects, via insert or via the two master sends … maybe you have both a reverb and a delay on your master effects. And then you also have a filter on the track.

So, a lot of stuff can be done—just with sampling anything and then mangling that sound right inside this box.

Right. And speaking to the portability factor, let’s say you head to a train station or something like that to grab some samples. When you have lo-fi sounds like that, contrasting with the very hi-fi sounds already in SEQTRAK, I think that’s incredibly inspiring and takes you to a totally different place than a MONTAGE plugged into a home studio with a mid- to high-end condenser microphone, that they might use for vocals or acoustic instruments. It’s just a totally different creative world.

Totally different.

I don’t think you can get in that creative space that easily without something this portable, that’s battery powered and high quality—but also not high quality if you so choose, right? It’s just a totally different experience. And I think that’s really cool.

The fact that the battery power comes from a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and not AAs, is so cool. And being able to do this, like what you’re saying, on a train where, “Okay, now I want to connect my app to it. I don't have to use a cable—I can just use my Bluetooth connectivity and be completely wireless working with this thing through headphones.” It’s one of the coolest instruments, really, that we’ve had in a long time, when you consider all of the pieces as it comes together.