## 1. Introduction

Sequitur allows you to record, compose, store, and play back music from your computer. It does this by providing you with tools to manipulate MIDI, a protocol that defines standard musical events, such as playing a note or selecting an instrument.

Sequitur is designed for people who like to tinker with their music. It facilitates rapid, dynamic, and radical processing of your performance. It allows you to quickly and precisely edit MIDI data.

In Sequitur, you work almost exclusively in two main windows: The song window provides an overview of your entire composition, and allows you to easily restructure passages, add instruments, and non-destructively process MIDI events. The track window provides the tools necessary for detailed editing of MIDI data.

For more information on MIDI, visit the MIDI Manufacturer's Association at www.midi.org.

1.1. Tracks, Phrases, Filters, and Pipelines
There are three main objects you will interact with:

- Tracks store performance data, such as notes or pitch bend information, bundled up inside of phrases. If you've ever worked with a MIDI sequencer before, the track should hold no surprises.

- Phrases store the actual performance data. You will only ever be aware of phrases while you are arranging your song. Whenever you are editing actual note and performance data, phrases might as well not exist.

- Filters are a generic way to process MIDI events. The most important thing you need to know about filters is this: You can never, ever escape them. Even the most basic task, hearing a note from one of your synthesizers, requires that the track has a filter telling it where to find your synthesizer.

  Filters are found only in pipelines, of which each track has three: An input pipeline for receiving MIDI data from a MIDI device, processing it, and placing it into phrases in the track; an edit pipeline, which works in conjunction with the pencil tool; and an output pipeline, which processes a track's data before sending it to a MIDI device for playback.