Angry Red Planet has announced the first version of Temper, a new sequencer designed for creative MIDI composition.

Temper is a modern DAW with expected features like a modular environment, flexible routing system, multiple takes per track and more, but the focus is on providing a clean user interface and a powerful set of MIDI editing tools built around three basic ideas: Operating on phrases of musical data; interactive, realtime phrase manipulation via MIDI keyboards; and extensive flexibility by decoupling what gets processed from how it gets processed.

Does the world need another MIDI sequencer? Maybe so. “Temper is designed to manipulate MIDI in ways that may be difficult in other applications,” according to its creators. “It’s intended to be interactive, exploratory and fun.”

Here’s a breakdown on how it works.

Generate

Temper includes a variety of tools for generating musical phrases and controller information. Use Velocirapture to rapidly create a line of velocity sculpted notes, Rudiments to paint drum rudiments, or Crudiments to generate complex filter sweeps. All tools are interactive, immediate and expandable with new shapes.

Manipulate

Whether you’ve performed, generated or imported your music, Temper provides a suite of tools to explore new musical ideas. Start with the four intrinsic tools: Shif-T, Shift-E, Sha-P and Sha-V are used to modify the start time, end time, pitch and velocity of notes. Further tools like Flip can be used to interactively flip notes by both time and pitch, or perform morphing flips guided by a shape.

Integrate

Easily export Temper MIDI tracks into other applications through simple drag and drop: Whenever one or more tracks are selected, a drag control appears, letting you drag these tracks to the desktop for creating a .mid file, or directly into any application that will receive .mid files.

Shape

At the heart of the system is the shape: objects for describing how MIDI events are transformed. Every advanced tool uses a shape to determine how to process events. Shapes are interactive, with control of parameters like sync rate or noise amount. Users can create new shapes to be swapped into existing tools or shared with other users.

Temper is available now for US $50.