I am pleased to announce that I will be presenting at Moogfest this year! I will stand humbly along side Yuri Suzuki, Felix Faire, Yoon Chung Han, and Scott Snibbe participating in “an afternoon exploring alternative interfaces for sound generation and manipulation, and the future of visual music” programmed by Eyeo Festival organizers including industry visionary Dave Schroeder. Checkout the Moogfest site for more details.
Recently I have been looking for a way to sync the Novation Bass Station II (BSII) and the Korg Volca Keys. So what’s the problem? They do not communicate without a third party. As the firmware stands on the BSII, MIDI clock is not sent via the MIDI out port. The BSII cannot be used as a master clock to sync other devices. Fortunately it can receive MIDI clock, but unfortunately the Volcas only have MIDI in. The Volcas have gate clock out, but the BSII doesn’t do gate or CV.
This is particularly frustrating because I bought both synths for an upcoming project and would like them to play well together. To get around this I have been using a third device to send MIDI clock to a thru box then taking outs from the thru to the Volca Keys and BSII. This creates a mess of, what should be unnecessary, cables and power supplies. The upcoming project involves travel and requires battery operation in remote locations without power, so this work-around is not acceptable.
My next thought was to build a MIDI clock box. There are a few examples on the market, but they can be expensive (except for this one). Fortunately DIY solutions, like the Arduino, are fairly easy to build. Another way is to use the Highly Liquid MIDI CPU. Sending the MIDI CPU a signal from a circuit with a 555 timer chip controlled by a potentiometer is a great solution. Using this technique I was able to sync the BSII from a test gate signal. I may finish building this anyway because I have all the parts and it’s an interesting project.
However, the ideal solution would be for these instruments to communicate without additional hardware. Novation has said that they might enable MIDI clock out on the BSII in a firmware update. This remains to be seen, so I can’t get my hopes up. As it turns out Korg, like with the Monotribe and Monotrons, made the Volcas very easy to modify. A simple MIDI out mod sends MIDI clock, note on/off, velocity, and more.
To add MIDI out one simply needs to attach a MIDI jack with three leads to clearly labeled solder points on the circuit board. There’s almost no room inside for a recessed MIDI jack, so I used some spacers and mounted the jack on the right hand side. This also keeps the MIDI lead away from the knobs for playability. Voila! It works beautifully. Thanks, Korg!
The Most Beautiful Sound in the World Competition is underway thanks to efforts from SoundCloud and BeautifulNow. Here’s what BeautifulNow representative, Rachel Whaley, had to say to ACB about the competition:
BeautifulNow, a new site focused on the most beautiful things happening in the world right now, is running a competition, in partnership with SoundCloud and The Sound Agency, to find THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SOUND IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW. It’s really cool! And we thought that you and your community would be really interested because you seem to be all about beautiful sound.
The competition is open for entries until 12/16, so there’s still time to enter. Here’s a link to the competition so you can check it out: beautifulnow.is/sound.
There’s a great prize package. We have awesome judges who will select finalists. And our community votes. How cool would it be if your sound could win The Most Beautiful Sound in the World? What do you think?
Check out our site, our Facebook page, and follow us on Twitter for more info and let us know what you think!
Here’s a quick demonstration on how to use the QuNexus to play the Korg Monotribe. To duplicate this technique you will need to update the Monotribe to version 2.10 or later then connect a TRRS mini jack to the sync in port on the Monotribe (tip is gate and the second ring is CV). All the cables you need are in the QuNexus cable kit. I also synched-up the Volca Keys for a simple chord progression. The parts on the Monotribe and Volca were recorded with “flux” mode. This is simply Korg’s term for non-quantized recording. Without “flux” mode on the parts would be made up entirely of 1/8th or 1/16th notes depending on the settings of each instrument (the Volca Keys can also do quarter notes on the 1/4 mode).
I have recently been trying out a Novation Bass Station II monophonic analogue synthesizer. I am quite impressed with this big sounding synth in a small package. While digitally controlled, Novation have focused on packing in proper synthesis features rather than trying to gloss over the sound with onboard effects. For example, as I have illustrated in the video, the filter self oscillates nicely with a clean sine wave that can be modulated in unique ways especially with distinct features like oscillator slew.
The video starts with the self oscillating filter getting modulated by LFO 2 using the triangle wave. After that I switch to using the sample and hold setting creating the well-known 60s computer sound of random notes. Here’s where it gets interesting though. Once I switch the LFO to sample and hold I start turning up the oscillator slew I mentioned earlier. What this does is variably smooth the wave shapes created by the LFO. You’ll hear this come in at 0:28. It sounds like portamento. At 0:35 I switch the LFO to the square wave, but with the slew on it sounds more like a sine. As I reduce the amount of slew the square wave regains its recognizable character. Next I switch it to the saw tooth wave. The nice thing here is that the LFO amount can go into negative values allowing the saw to be reversed.
Another distinctive feature is the oscillator filter mod setting. This modulates the filter with oscillator 2. Since the oscillators range from subsonic to almost supersonic this feature offers modulation effects that are not possible with the LFOs. At 1:29 you will start to hear the oscillator filter mod come in using a pulse waveform. What makes this interesting is that while oscillator 2 is modulating the filter it can also have the pulse width modulated by LFO 1. This can cause bit-reduction-like effects that can be heard between 1:49 and 2:19. At 2:20 I start tapping the octave and waveform buttons on oscillator 2 illustrating what happens when the modulation source is instantly shifted an octave at a time. After a bit more messing around I added a final, manual filter sweep at 3:20.