Overview
The Sequencer turns your library into a drum machine. You assign your own samples to pads, program each pad on its own step lane, and play the whole thing back in sync. It’s made for sketching a groove and handing it to your DAW — not for finishing a track inside Sample Vault. Playback and sample suggestions run on your machine, so the Sequencer works offline and is free to use.The pad grid
Each pad holds one sample and plays one voice. You choose how many pads you want, from a single row up to an 8×8 grid, and every pad is mapped to a musical note so it can be driven from a controller later. To fill a pad you can pick a sample from your library, drop one onto it, or let the Sequencer choose. Clicking a pad auditions whatever is loaded. Each pad can be muted, soloed, or locked. Locking a pad protects its sample from the random, reroll, and kit-building actions, so you can keep the sounds you like and reroll the rest.Polymetric step lanes
Every pad gets its own step lane, and lanes are independent: each has its own number of steps and its own rate. Give one pad seven steps and another sixteen and they drift against each other, only realigning after a long cycle. That polymetry is the point — it keeps a loop evolving instead of repeating every bar. Within a lane you can:- Set how many steps it has and how fast they run, including triplets.
- Set how hard each step hits by dragging it up or down.
- Tune individual steps up or down, with the resulting note shown against the pad’s key.
- Snap to key so step pitches stay inside the detected key and scale and never clash.
- Put pads in a choke group so they cut each other off — the way a closed hat silences an open one, or each note of an 808 glide stops the last.
Sourcing samples
Because Sample Vault already knows what your samples sound like, the Sequencer can help you fill pads:- Swap for similar steps a pad through samples that sound like the one it holds, so you can audition variations without leaving the grid.
- Build kit fills the unlocked pads with a matching set of sounds pulled from your library.
- Reroll swaps every unlocked pad at once — either for fresh picks from each pad’s own source or for new similar-sounding samples.
- Random drops a random sample from your library onto a pad.
- Design with AI builds a whole groove from a short description — choosing the kit, programming the pattern, and setting the tempo and swing to fit — or reworks what’s already loaded when you describe a tweak. Locked pads stay untouched.
- Design this lane points the same AI at a single pad to swap its sound, rework its rhythm, or both, leaving the rest of the grid alone.
Playing along
The whole pattern shares one tempo and one swing amount. When an Ableton Link session is running, the Sequencer follows the shared tempo so it stays locked to your DAW. See Link, Tempo and Key Lock for how Link works. Patterns save automatically as you work, so you can close the panel and pick up where you left off.Exporting to your DAW
When the groove is right, take it with you — or keep it in your library:- MIDI clip exports the pattern as a single MIDI clip with each pad on its own note, alongside a manifest that maps each note to the sample it should play, so your DAW can rebuild the kit.
- Audio render bounces the pattern to a WAV file. Because polymetric patterns can run for a very long time before they repeat, the render is clamped to a sensible length.
- Save as a sample renders the pattern back into your library as an audio file — analyzed on the spot and tagged as a loop at the pattern’s tempo — so you can find it, audition it, and drop it onto a pad later.
- Copy to clipboard puts the MIDI clip or the WAV render on your clipboard, ready to paste straight into your DAW or a folder.
Limitations
- Swap for similar needs analyzed samples. Pads filled from raw files outside your scanned library can still play, but won’t have similar-sound matches until the sample is in your library.
- The Sequencer is for sketching, not arranging. There’s no song mode or arrangement timeline — build a pattern, then finish the arrangement in your DAW.