I took too long to edit my accidentally posted too soon post, so here's the rest. If someone could remove the post above, it would be as if nothing ever went wrong....
I'm a little obsessed with sequencers. Umm, Pyramid I haven't played with much for some reason. It's an unorthodox box that doesn't really do linear, which is surprisingly alien to me. Beast of a sequencer though going far beyond the regular functions of a workstation sequencer.
QY700 is another beast but of a different nature. Truly GM sequencing at it's finest, but does require a great knowledge of MIDI to run without using GM synths. It likes to send every reset and zeroing messages that exist, especially if you are using the pattern mode, you need to tailor the track to the exact preset on the synth/dmachine you are using it with. The way around it is to use filtering or editing out the messages after each initial recording pass. It also has a woeful event max which sorta forces the user to resort to the patterns (and the pain that comes with that). Aside that, you can really ride the sequencer with it's mixer screen. The buttons and keys are great and no digiencoders to fail like on later Yammy machines. There's something about punching in values with a keypad that is satisfying.
Q80. Great box. Linear sequence with no pattern mode that I can remember, but did have a phrase recording function I used to paste out linear compositions. Higher event max than the QY700, but two line displays are hard to go back to. Going from an M1 sequencer to the Q80 was a dream though.
MV8000 has a crazy good sequencer on it with features that are only rivaled in my kit by the Pyramid. Excellent drum/pattern + linear sequencer, CC envelope/lfo generator, easy to edit, pita to use as a sampler though. Not really tried it out as a performance sequencer as such, though it's quite flexible on the sample triggering side of things, and I also recall some way of triggering the patterns for muting/unmuting percussion.
I really use it as a modulations utility for hard printed CC's. Pyramid uses actual LFO's to modulate CC's but without printing the output to a pattern or the like, so to have a particular modulation or swell of CC's occur on cue exactly the same each time the MV8000 is perfect.
The Fat Controller is great fun, if hard to find now. Fun 2x8/1x16 step sequencer. As well as MIDI out it has two CV and two trigger outs plus sync24. Can run as 2x8 step sequences or an 8 + 16 step sequence via CV+trig. Got slide on CV which in conjunction with hold can give 303 like sequencing.
Then there's the Arturia stepsequencers I have, Beatstep Pro and Keystep. Both are quite nifty loop sequencers that I am really revolving every other sequencer I own around. The BSP has a pattern chaining function so can work well along side my linear sequencers and the Keystep's a simple but very usable chord progression machine pretty much. Sequencing the BSP transposition via the Keystep is a natural thing to do really, which brings us to:
A common modular technique is "sequencing the sequencer," and you can get anything between nice complexity and incomprehensible chaos.
That's one of the things that has saved my Rhythm Wolf from the 2nd hand pages. I run a gate out from a BSP to it's clock in to advance it. Usually a bass drum or tock sequence. I've tried writing sequences on it like that but it's much more successful if I write a pattern that will stand alone if played with a regular clock.
I setup a little patch where I had my Keystep feeding the arpeggiator in the Bitstream 3x (it's got some preset note intervals for some of it's arpeggio patterns for pseudo-sequencing). Result was like something Kate Bush would have written.