#Korg Volca Keys

[synaesmedia]

La Monte Young type Spiritual Drone (No talking)

[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.

[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.

[crimesididntcommit]

FIVE YEARS OF NOCTURNAL YOUTH. Five years ago today my first real, “canonical” album Nocturnal Youth came out.

I had put out a few collections of what were essentially sketches and demos back then, but …Youth was the first thing to feel like a genuine, realized artistic statement. It’s the album where I first figured out what it was that crimesididntcommit should be, a series of coarse, confrontationally confessional admissions of heartache, ugliness, self-loathing and despair. 

After messing around with a lot of instrumental, soundscape-y work out of anxieties around my voice (which was terribly underdeveloped) and embarrassment around putting my lyrics and feelings front and center, this came out of me. There’s nowhere for me to hide on it — from the first lines, “I only hurt you ‘cause you say that you like it,” to the last, “How long do we have? Do I have you?” — it’s an album that is painfully upfront. 

I didn’t plan on writing a lot about this record today, but it felt like too big an anniversary to ignore, and I hadn’t listened to it in years. The current incarnation of crimesididntcommit really begins with my album sentimental, but Nocturnal Youth is in many ways the blueprint that I would spend years sonically chasing and attempting to understand or perfect. I made the entire thing on an iPhone in GarageBand, singing half the vocals on smoke breaks at a dead end job in a dying, middle of nowhere mall. The store was going out of business; I’d just experienced a several-month breakdown and dissolution of a ten year friendship, a blossoming, toxic romantic relationship and the first circle of adult friends I had ever made as an openly trans woman. I had started the early, manic stages of a drug addiction that began right as I became equally addicted to another person, and both were now cut off from me. I was cutting myself regularly, new scars covering my upper arms all the time. Everywhere I looked seemed like another reason to drive into a wall, but my car had already exploded at 2 AM on a toll road after the radiator cracked and the engine head blew. 

Years later in accelerated resolution therapy I would recount standing over that SUV, lifting the hood as a toxic cloud of coolant and smoke rolled hot across my face and stuck inside my lungs, the perfect metaphor for how all of my life seemed to be at the time, but way before I started getting actual clinical help, I made this.

It’s surreal for me to listen to this album today, on Valentine’s of 2025. I know the girl who made it, but I’m not her almost at all anymore. I like her now more than she liked herself then. She was a completely unknowable, unmanageable, out of control lunatic in constant agony and radiating it out onto everyone else around her, but she was trying her best to feel alive against a brain that wanted her to die. 

For all the intense despair and misery and “just-let-me-die-please” energy eagerly polluting every track, I hear so much creativity, so many explorations and big swings. The vocals for the title track were sang while battling strep throat, laying on a torn up couch, eyes shut facing the ceiling. It’s an album full of sounds of dismantling machines — I’d run Korg synths through bookshelf speakers and record the results into an old phone mic, a process I still use sometimes today. I didn’t even have a real MIDI keyboard at the time, so I’d use the touch ribbon on the Volca Keys, a profoundly frustrating and limiting thing, and program loops until they sounded just one step away from falling apart. There are so many lyrics about feeling trapped — “towns like this have claws dug deep in our skin,” “here in our box, here in our cage, we’re still locked up, it still remains” — broiling with trauma, skin bubbling and blistering in the cigarette lighter dark. But I felt free when I was working on these songs, writing and rewriting lyrics again and again in spiral notebooks, scrawling and doodling and drawing the feelings of each song out. I would put sketches on printer paper over the blinking lights of synths to make them glow and stare at the color in the dark to try and heighten the mood I was capturing.

A song like “Scars” makes me want to give who I used to be a hug just as much as a slap to the face; it’s one of the most openly toxic, unstable, genuinely abusive things I’ve ever written, both towards myself and the people that inspired it. I just want to shake her by the shoulders and tell her to get it together, girl! I’m years away from that kind of behavior now, but I can remember laying in my art studio, carving up parts of my body, rubbing the bloody skin across canvases and sending photos to people, desperate for someone to see what I was going through and, if not save me, tell me I was okay. All of it was a desperation to feel like I could be okay. Listening to this song for the first time in years, I’m struck by how stark it actually is, incredibly minimal until the end sprint. There’s no resolution, there’s no comfort, there’s just a piercing, uncomfortable final cut before the end of the album.

The final song, “Electric You,” is, along with “Field of Fog,” the best of the album, and I love that it’s the ending. The mumbling, buried beneath the surface spoken word at the start are a frantic, manic plea to someone on an answering machine that you know they’ll never hear. (I didn’t actually leave that as a message on a machine, but that was the vibe I was going for.) I had come to the realization that I was wasting my time trying to get through to someone who didn’t want me to anymore, and so really, almost all of the lyrics referring to “you” on this album are towards a different side of myself. When I ask how long we have, I’m singing as much to an ex as I am to myself. Everything good felt so fleeting to me back then.

I remember standing in a parking lot behind a bar I used to loiter around when I took the cover photo. I had just been doing my drug of choice at the time and had cut my finger prepping it, not noticing until I’d already stepped out from the seat of someone’s car and lit a cigarette. It was October of 2019 and I felt like the whole world was about to end, somehow, someway. My entire life had an apocalyptic energy to it, and every time I went out, every night I spent at someone’s house, sleeping on a couch or floor or borrowed bed, felt like a party at the end of the world. I didn’t know how much longer I or anyone would be alive. These are the ways that mental illness color everything; it’s like looking at the world through a filter that turns it into a mirror, reflecting whatever it is you feel back. I don’t think that’s only true of people who are mentally ill or going through it — I genuinely believe all the concepts of karma and visualization and positive thinking are rooted in that, we find reflections of what’s inside of us wherever we go, and they can be beautiful. But at that point in time everything felt like a temporary, pointless parade in the dark, balloons about to be forgotten, half-deflated, sulking in the corner of the once-full room as the ghosts of who we once were moved along in shadow. I couldn’t think of a better cover for the record — a self-inflicted wound, a single hand reaching out in the dark, something smoldering, something that will only make you sick with time.

At some point in this period of time, I told someone who was very important to me and who I wish I still knew that I was thinking about calling my new album nocturnal youth. He looked at me and without pause said “Well, that’s what you are.” I think about that, and I think about him, and I think about all the other people I used to know but don’t anymore, most of that through my own faults, but some of them not, and I think about how this year I’ll turn 29, and how, five years ago, I was a nocturnal youth, and for at least the next year and a half, I still am, too. 

I’m just happier now.

It’s not a perfect record, and I’d never make it today, and that’s why I love it still. You can listen to it here: https://crimesididntcommit.bandcamp.com/album/nocturnal-youth https://open.spotify.com/album/32VeJbH6Awae2GK7YoiTEc?si=kZcAlNtUQ6asyMMAw3CHcA

[jjjandhismusicbank]

its so tempting for me to buy a korg volca keys again, but thats what we call in the industry as really fucking stupid

[rudeteens]

My babies favorite toy is the korg volca 2. She also loves when you jingle keys in front of the modular synth

[macman1223]

never heard this BUT it uses one of the Korg Volca Keys preset sequences which is wonderful

[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 💙

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.