While still in the process of mining sound from previous sessions I came across this arpeggiated sequence that evolves over time as I adjusted the speed of the LFO which was mapped to the VCF.

Evolving Arpeggio with LFO on VCF

One of the very special things about the Roland MKS-80 is that is has true analog, voltage controlled oscillators or VCOs. Unfortunately (or fortunately) VCOs are sensitive to environmental conditions especially temperature, not to mention lunar cycles and barometric pressure, but I can’t confirm those reports. In any case, this means that the synth needs time to warm up before the VCOs are stable.

Fortunately the MKS-80 has an autotune (no relation to the ubiquitous vocal processing of the same name) button that tunes all sixteen of the oscillators to each other automatically. Although, if you just turn it on, press autotune and start playing then it will drift out of tune again as the components warm up to a stable temperature. Below is an example of me doing just that followed by a pause where I pressed the autotune button and tried again.

Although an inconvenience to some, to me this gives the instrument more soul than its digital counterparts. As a piano player I know that a piano is never perfectly in tune. Also, the frequency of the notes played on a piano change slightly as they decay. Voltage controlled analog oscillators have a soulful, mysterious character to them that is partially defined by their imperfections.

Out of Tune In Tune

Here’s another arpeggio from a previous session where I recorded a broad collection of Roland MKS-80 sounds arpeggiated by the Bitstream 3X. What I like about this piece in particular is the way the free-running analog LFO is modulating the VCF. The typical behavior of a digital LFO is to restart the waveform from zero for each new note. However, on the MKS-80 we can hear the continuous, counter-rhythmic pulse of the LFO on the notes as they are played.

Arpeggio with LFO Routed to the VCF

More Nice Accents