Create amazing effects with an arpeggiator

Arpeggiators may look simple, but with a bit know-how you can use them to create some pretty amazing effects

One of the hallmarks of dance music is the arpeggiator.

Trance, techno, hardhouse, and ambient tracks almost always have arpeggiated patterns strewn across them.

First created back in the 1960s, the arpeggiator has been one of the most enduring features of modern synthesizers and has now made its way into pretty much every music sequencing package on the market.

Arpeggiators were first added to synths in the 1960s.

They allowed players hold down a chord and have the synth automatically create an arpeggio from the notes (imagine plucking the individual notes of a chord on a guitar rather than strumming them and you’ll get the idea).

These hardware arpeggiators usually had relatively simple controls that allowed players to vary the speed of the arpeggio and the order in which the notes were played.

This order control was usually switchable between up, down and random, although later arpeggiators added more control over the sequence in which the notes were played and allowed different arpeggios to be layered on top of each other, to the extent that they blurred the lines between an arpeggiator and step sequencer.

Many arpeggiators also featured a hold button so once the arpeggio had started it would keep playing when the player lifted their hands from the keys.

This was perhaps crucial to their use in dance music, as dance producers would start and arpeggio running, use the hold button to sustain it and then play with the synth’s filter cut off and resonance controls to add urgency and drama to track.

Arpeggiators were popular on analogue synths all through the 1970s and the early 1980s, but started to fall out of fashion as the new breed of digital synths, such as the Casio CZ-101 and Korg M1 arrived in the mid 1980s.

However, the resurgence of interest in old analogue synths with the growth of dance music throughout the 1990s saw the arpeggiator make a big comeback, with the result that they’re found on pretty much all modern synths and in all music creation packages on the market today.