How the sequencer works on the Roland 303 or Behringer TDR – Tutorial

So I recently picked up a Roland 303 clone – the Behringer TD3 and man is this thing not intuitive. No wonder it was a complete flop back in the 80s. That being said I LOVE the thing. The real charm of the instrument are the happy accidents you get when you punch in a bunch or random note, random ties and rests and slides and tuning and then tweak the filter. Add some reverb and slow it down and you can make some very cool minimal bass line (it’s not just for Acid house!). But beyond the random stuff I really struggled to get my head around ho you could program something more deliberate into it. I watched a few videos but pretty much everyone was just punching in randomness and not fully explaining what the 16th note, tie and rest actually did. Not being classically trained I needed to google “what is a note tie” and found out that Roland even managed to misname this! Apparently a note tie technically ties notes together of the SAME pitch. Now maybe I’m getting this wrong and not Roland but it seems that in the case of the 303/TD3 the tie is more like a sustain because the following note can be of a different pitch. Anyway… I made a 10 minute video looking at how to program the 303/TD3 deliberately (ie not randomly). The examples I use in the video are stupidly simple but they are designed to just make sense of the sequencer and these cryptic note symbols.