#Korg Volca Keys

[rokusenryou]

長いようで短い伊平屋島生活楽しいけどもう終わりに差し掛かってます。

今年もアサラト部が出来たし、新たに電脳倶楽部も発足しました♪

[mops-1]

Ambient electronic music jam session, live recorded under a bridge in Prague, Czech Republic. Korg Volca Bass & Keys. Featuring local graffiti tags.

[localwarlockunion]

i ordered a korg volca keys synth, im going to make so many sounds and noises with this thing

[burlveneer-music]

The Twelve Hour Foundation - THF Compendium - 36 odds and ends collected on one CD / digital album; RIYL Clay Pipe Music, Ghost Box

Polly Hulse: Yamaha CS-10, vocoder, flute, field recordings Jez Butler: Moog Rogue, Korg Volca Keys, concrete sequences This collection brings together a selection of albums, EPs and bonus tracks previously unreleased on CD, plus bonus track from The Lighter Side of Concrete. Polly Hulse: Yamaha CS-10, vocoder, flute, field recordings Jez Butler: Moog Rogue, Korg Volca Keys, concrete sequences

[taperwolf]

I only have two full-blown, commercially available hardware synthesizers¹. One is my much-loved Minibrute 2S, which I've talked about before. The other is an odd duck, the Yamaha PSS-480, released in 1988.

(Not my photo, and mine has slightly different badging:)

To all appearances, it's very like the assorted keyboards Yamaha and Casio were making in the late 1980s and into the '90s, with a big list of preprogrammed voices and auto-accompaniment patterns printed on the face, chunky speakers, and miniature keys. But this model, unlike a lot of the later ones, exposes enough of the FM synthesis chip to user control that you can create your own voices; the added MIDI capabilities make it strangely competent.

But I bring it up because of the rightmost control button, which I suspect marks it as firmly on the cheap side of the consumer/professional divide:

...the dedicated "play a demo song" button.

I mean, I get why people selling keyboards would want an easy way to show off how the thing sounds, and you often hear that music stores would refuse to stock the early synthesizers because the interfaces were so opaque. But it's very off-putting to realize that that cheesy little song has been taking up its own button and space on the control panel for 35 years, useless once it's outside the original showroom.

(I tried to do a quick scan of the Yamaha back catalog and clock which keyboards had a dedicated demo song or songs, but the pictures are small, and I couldn't easily find someone who'd already done the research.)

I have a few small synths, but they're either toy-like (Korg Monotron Delay and Duo, Kaossilator, NSX-39 Pocket Miku) or kit builds (Gakken SX-150). For clarity, I'd probably class something as powerful as a Volca or NTS-1 as "full blown", but not, say, a Pocket Operator or a Stylophone.

[surumarssi]

"A cover of Have a Nice Life's 'A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut' on the clawhammer banjo and the Korg Volca Keys."

[evehaze]

I'm wanting to get into analogue sound gear, any cool recommendations for specifically like dark atmospheric, lingering, yearning sounds? I'm eyeing up a Korg Volca Keys as I've seen cool stuff done with that recorded through a tape deck, but would love some suggestions 💙

[musc3603shenanigans]

PROCESS

My first attempt at turning the original riff into a song was a rough draft I made on GarageBand on my phone. It has a much slower tempo than the finished piece, and featured an entirely different chorus. It sounds more stylistically similar to one of the inspiration pieces, ‘Honestly?’, with a slower tempo and call-and-response style vocals. I incorporated the call and response in the final verse of the piece - you can hear the inspiration from ‘Honestly?’ in the EQing of the vocals.

To start on the actual piece, I first recorded several electric guitar parts, starting with the fingerpicked verse riff, then a few different strumming patterns over different chords and lead guitar riffs to play over. I panned one of these riffs to the right. I turned these into loops to experiment with different structures for the piece. I EQd and compressed these as I went, as my guitar has quite a woolly sound that I wanted to remove through EQing. I used a high pass filter and a high shelf on all the tracks, and tweaked it slightly as I thought each needed. I used parallel processing to add reverb to these tracks, and also added overdrive and distortion to some of the original tracks. I used a new overdrive plugin for this piece, which I ended up preferring to my usual plugin.

I then recorded some acoustic guitar parts, - specifically a high strumming pattern and a picked riff similar to the electric guitar riff, and panned this to the left. I EQd and compressed these similarly to the electric guitar tracks, but with more high end. For both parts, I used parallel processing for reverb, and for the picked riff I also added delay.

I recorded 4 takes of the main vocals for doubling. One was a lower harmony, panned centre, and the other 3 were in unison. I panned two of these unison tracks to each side, and set one to the centre. I EQd these vocal parts to have a nice airy quality to them, as inspired by ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ and ‘when you sleep’, but for the centre vocal track I also boosted it at the 1kHz mark for extra clarity. The vocals in the chorus are off-key at best, but it’s in a tough spot for my voice since starting HRT.

I recorded the bass at this point, which mostly followed the chord’s played by the guitars. I had a few different tracks for each bass section, and decided to bus these to a reverb track instead of parallel processing all of them to save a little bit of CPU.

Then, I programmed a simple drum section using Manda Audio’s MTPowerDrumkit virtual instrument, programming the kick, snare, high hats, and cymbals to a separate track each. These were all 1 bar loops that repeated throughout most of the track. This virtual instrument is already quite processed, so I did not compress the tracks, but I did EQ them to suit the style of the piece - I specifically boosted the kick and snare at the transient, and also removed some boomy sounds from the snare. For the hi hats and cymbals, I used a high shelf to further drive the airy top end of the piece.

I also programmed 2 synth melodies to add texture during the chorus. I originally wanted to record directly from my Korg Volca FM, but I could not get a nice sound from the mini-jack output, and I don’t own a 5 pin DIN cable for it either.

After this, most of the process was shuffling around clips and sections to develop the structure. This was difficult for me, as generally my songwriting process is completed before I begin recording a track, but for this I allowed a lot of the composition to be created within my DAW. I recorded an intro section to the piece, as well as a few more vocal tracks, and after that I just focused on mixing and adding volume automation to the piece.

CREATIVE WORK 3

INSPIRATION AND VISION

Originally, I struggled deciding on a style for this piece. I was still very inspired from the previous soundscape task and found myself drawn to experimental and soundscape-like works such as ‘Sad Redux-O-Grapher’ by Xiu Xiu, especially in regards to its combination of synthesised and organic sounds (https://youtu.be/qm_TeOjdUbo?t=47) and harsh vocals (https://youtu.be/qm_TeOjdUbo?t=102). I was also inspired by ‘Fear Eats The Soul’ by Sea Power, this time for its complicated layering of simple instrumental sections and breathy vocals (https://youtu.be/gnG2Jh91AkY?t=168).

I ended up choosing to explore a dreampop/shoegaze-like sound that incorporated some aspects of midwest emo, particularly in its guitar riffs. I felt like this incorporated aspects I already have some confidence in (in composing the instrumental sections themselves), but also parts that I found more challenging, like the liberal use of effects and numerous layers. I was inspired by the sounds of my bloody valentine, Cocteau Twins, and Hachiku for their dreampop sounds. I was really drawn to the vocal production of ‘when you sleep’, the dense instrumentation of ‘Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires’, and the combination particular synth and guitar combinations of ‘Bridging Visa B’. The midwest emo influence of this piece was mostly inspired by the complicated guitar riffs and alternate tuning of American Football, with some of the compositional influence from Modern Baseball. The fingerpicked guitar riff in the versed was heavily inspired by the riff in ‘Never Meant’, and the the structure of vocal phrases and sections inspired by ‘Honestly?’. I first came up with this main riff in August 2022, but I had not used it in an actual piece and wanted to explore what I could build from a single riff. The guitar for this song was composed in EACGBe tuning, which I took from ‘Jewels and Bullets’ by You Am I - the minor chord that the three lowest strings create in this tuning makes for some interesting open chord sounds.

[stellarvulpes]

I know Loki has been out for a bit and it just ended but I'm gonna be a nerd and point out that the sci fi technology used in the first episode

more specifically the item on the far left, is literally this

Which is a synthesizer used for making music. And I just find it so hilarious that some guy who worked for Disney saw some instrument and thought "woah that looks so futuristic let's put that on the set" and put some cool portable synthesizer in some guy's office.

[mops-1]

Synthesizer jam session live recording, on a traffic Island in the Smichov neighborhood of Prague, Czech Republic.

Korg Minilogue and Volca Keys. Novation Rhythm.

[struwwelzeter]

I really have absolutely no excuse for being such a horrible brandwhore other than that I genuinly needed one of these and it wasn’t more expensive than something comparable?!

Also, yes, I did buy my first synthesizer :)

[kingdomofthelogos]

St Sebastian: Overcoming a World of Evil

Saint Sebastian lived in the 3rd Century, and was a Christian Martyr executed by Rome. He served in the Roman military, working undercover to help Christians persecuted by Rome. When he was discovered, he was sentenced to execution by archers. However, he survived and regained his health. Unfortunately, when we went to to confront Emperor Diocletian personally, he was executed on the spot.

[anti-philia]

Improvisación de un tema ambiental, weas que me gusta hacer y grabar.

[neapolitanhusky]

09/12/2017 2300 -- “Sergals”

Oh and as I’ve been doing lately, here’s the full jam on Youtube as its own separate post. So that way you can have a nice Tumblr-centric version and the full version with links and shite. Because reaassoonnnsss.

Also put on your nerd glasses, it’s technical details time! *AHEM* The Korg Electribe 2S is the master clock in this case, with the Volca Keys being slaved to it via-MIDI. The Electribe is also acting as a drum machine here, providing the rhythm track. The Volca Keys’s audio output is being routed through the Electribe’s audio in as well. And all of it is being recorded by my portable Tascam recorder and then limited slightly in Audacity.

-- DOWNLOAD FOR THOSE INTERESTED: http://www.mediafire.com/file/npgbhm9ancocp63/Neapolitan_Husky+--+Sergals.mp3

-- LISTEN TO ON SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/neapolitanhusky/sergals

[jasons-lens]

Watch "Some kind of dub ( drum n bass mix)." on YouTube

Drum n bass style.