FlatSix captured my imagination last year with the Arp Of Darkness. I was so enraptured by the simple yet fascinating functionality that I made it my Sound On Sound pick of the year. FlatSix have released another module based on the same hardware but with a distinct firmware. It’s called the Seventh Summoner, and I was keen to see if it could hit the same high notes.
The unsettlingly named Seventh Summoner is a really simple sequencer, and as with the Arp Of Darkness, it does just enough to make itself fabulously useful. The 26HP, 1U module is quite striking, yet other than the button keyboard stretching for a single octave, there’s not much else going on. You have a couple of buttons, a trimmer knob for Glide and time division and two patch points — that’s it. The idea is that you punch in the notes in an SH‑101 step‑sequenced style, and the Seventh Summoner plays them back.
Finger Choreography
The programming requires a little bit of finger choreography. The Shift button on the right does a lot of heavy lifting. Hold and keep holding Shift, press Play (octave up), select one of the six sequence slots (white notes), and then press Rec (octave down), release Shift. The sequence is now cleared and ready for notes. You can enter up to 32 notes in a sequence or stop when you’ve had enough. Hold Shift and press Play to save it. The sequence will instantly start playing with reference to the pulse coming into the gate input. But hang on; is there no gate output? No, the Seventh Summoner only sequences notes, not gates, so you’ll have to use something else to fire envelopes or define step lengths if that’s what you want.
Using the keys and octave buttons, you can transpose, and there are a handful of playback modes you can access with the popular Shift button. These include forwards, backwards, ping‑pong, random and Golden Ratio. Golden Ratio uses the Fibonacci sequence to calculate which step to go to next. The result is a seemingly endless variation on the programmed sequence that feels somehow more natural than pure randomisation.
Lastly, we have the Summoner mode, where you can chain up to 16 sequences. You can specify transposition and playback mode for each sequence as you add them to the chain. It’s simple but quite powerful in its own way.
There are many things it lacks. An LED would be useful just so you know it’s clocked and working. The loss of the top C to form the Shift button is mildly annoying. The lack of gate output is perhaps inconvenient, but I actually like to do gating separately and it encourages me to find patterns elsewhere that are not tied to the same workflow. I’d like to see a real‑time mode where you could add notes as the sequence loops, and a play‑through mode so you could override the sequence.
For me, there’s just enough to make the Seventh Summoner a superbly valuable use of 1U space.
For me, there’s just enough to make the Seventh Summoner a superbly valuable use of 1U space. Eurorack sequencers are often big, chunky, multi‑channel affairs that overflow with features. Whereas here, you have a bunch of sequences snuggled away in a 1U row that you can pull from your back pocket any time they’re needed. Once you’ve committed the finger functions to memory, it becomes a terribly useful module.