Pick Yourself’s Sequencer Hack: Finish Tracks Before Your Coffee Gets Cold

Let’s be real: most of us spend more time moving clips around than actually making music. Pick Yourself calls out this classic trap right from the jump, admitting that the old way of copying, stacking, and praying for inspiration just eats up your weekends. Instead of letting your DAW look like a game of Tetris, there’s a smarter way to get your tracks moving—literally and figuratively.

The big revelation? Automate your sequencer parameters. Philipp stumbled onto this hack after months of creative gridlock, and suddenly tracks started finishing themselves. Forget about endless clip duplication; let the sequencer do the heavy lifting and watch your ideas evolve almost on autopilot. It’s like having a ghost producer in your machine, minus the shady contracts.

Now, here’s where things get spicy. Instead of scribbling in endless MIDI notes, Pick Yourself shows how automating stuff like gate length and step count can totally flip your arrangement game. Using the MDDSnake sequencer, he starts with just a handful of notes—think of it as your beat’s street food cart before it becomes a full-on block party.

By tweaking parameters like gate length and note sequence length, you can morph a simple four-note groove into a polymetric monster, or stretch it out for that late-night warehouse vibe. The best part? All these moves are automatable, so your track can build, drop, and mutate without you ever touching the mouse again. That’s workflow efficiency you can taste.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Philipp walks through how to take that barebones loop and flesh it out into a full arrangement, all in real time. He starts by automating the basics, then layers in expression parameters—think velocity mapped to FM amount for extra movement. The result? A groove that keeps shifting under your feet, never settling into predictable territory.

He even drops a killer tip: automate the snake shape itself to remix your sequence on the fly. It’s like flipping the script mid-track without breaking a sweat. By combining step length tweaks and shape changes, you get endless variations without ever losing the core vibe.

And for all you arrangement-phobes, he lays out a skeleton workflow: automate the main sequence, then build around it with drums, hats, and atmospheres. The magic is in the automation, not in endless mouse clicks. Trust me, you gotta see the video to catch all the subtle moves—words can’t do justice to the way these sequences morph in real time.