Submitted by thewhippinpost on Mon, 12/02/2007 - 16:38.

I was watching a Reason tutorial video the other day and there was this dude who obviously hadn't learnt the art of editing video... 'cos there wasn't any! We're left watching this guy sitting at his PC figuring out where to go with this sample that was looping... and looping... and looping!

... which made me laugh - 'cos that's exactly what I do!

For hours on end sometimes, I'll have a loop cycling and rather than switching the damn thing off, I'll just keep the thing running whilst making tweaks or trying stuff out. Watching him made me realise just how annoying it really must be for family and neighbours.

But it reminded me of some of the stupid mind-games I sometimes find myself playing in the sequencer. I'm going to share two of them with you because the people that make the Monopoly board game turned them down.

Two stress-inducing sequencer games

Beat the Loop: Challenge 1

The loop locators are set around, say, a 2 or 4-bar loop, you're in the piano roll or audio editor and the part is cycling so you can hear the changes you make.

The challenge is to listen, locate with mouse and make the desired change before the cursor comes around again.

Beat the Loop - Challenge 2

You're looping and adding/editing/moving an arrangement in the project window. It's a new part. You're not quite sure how it sounds in context with the whole song yet. Let me be clear on that: you're messing about with the arrangement, which could be a chorus, or middle-eight, for example.

The song is running at somewhere in excess of 3 minutes (So it spans a fair bit of the project window). You want to listen to the whole song now to assess how it works in context with the whole song.

The challenge is - without stopping the loop-cycle - to zoom out and set the left locator to the exact beginning of the track before the cursor comes around... even more fun if your song starts on the 3rd bar (because the first 2 have MIDI setup data)!

Just some of the fun things I always seem to do... all because I can't be arsed to click the stop button.

Got any mind-numbing games you play? Share them below.