Music from my brother's microKORG
an exercise in focus & the accidental results from some noodling with a 23 year old synth
The older I get & the deeper I go into this musical journey, the more I appreciate the importance of keeping one’s focus. The world around us is becoming more distracting & quite frankly brain-melting by the day & it’s a constant practice of mine to try to continue to hone my mental muscles that were once so active & fit, before the days of smartphones & social media. Specifically in the world of music-making, all of the tools you could ever imagine are available at your finger tips at all times. It can be so incredibly overwhelming at times when you sit down to try to get an idea together & all of the sudden there are too many choices in front of you. You feel burnt out & frustrated so you just move on to do something else because the flow just isn’t there. It’s a feeling we’re all too familiar with, whether you make music or not. On that topic, I really enjoyed the latest video from mylarmelodies about the idea of shifting your perspective when it comes to modular synths - focusing your GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) towards the modules you already own, rather than towards new ones you don’t yet have. I think this truly is the secret to happiness & productivity in the studio.
A track popped out in the lab last night that I’m really quite fond of (you can scroll down & listen to it as you read). My favorite ideas are never really the direct result of sitting down to try something from a point of intent. Instead, they’re usually the result of some random patch idea I’ve been thinking about for a while, or they’re the result of this scarcity & simplicity I mentioned above. When I sat down at my desk, I wanted to finally try out an idea I spoke about in my ‘patching from maine’ post, using my Mannequins Just Friends module as a slew limiter - a tool that can smoothen out an incoming CV signal. It’s similar to the attack of an envelope in a way, as both of them affect the onset of a signal, but slew affects the transitions between the signal (for example the steps of a sequence can be given a glide or slide effect by sending the cv through a slew limiter).
This type of CV processing can be really nice with ambient music, making melodies a bit more abstract by gluing notes together & washing everything out a bit. I was trying this out for a little while & was so happy to have yet another reason to love my Just Friends module which I’ll continue to rave about on here every chance I can get. Here’s a short clip of some of the tinkering with this idea:
To briefly explain the patch here, I’m using an envelope shape from Rabid Elephant’s Natural Gate (it’s a low pass gate but the outputs are DC coupled so you can use it as an envelope generator as well) & sending that to the ‘air’ jack (VCA) on my Mannequins Mangrove oscillator. In between that though, the envelope is going through Just Friends in STRATA mode which allows me to add slew to the envelope which as you can see in the video, when I twist the time knob (v/oct) counterclockwise, it smoothens out those sharp hits. Then add the output to Sealegs for a bit of magic & voilà!
One thing led to another & an hour or so later, I had a sequence from my modular system that I finally liked & wanted to record. I was trying to add some pads from my microKORG to this looping sequence. I’ve had that synth sitting right at my desk in front of me recently - it’s set up as an overarching midi controller so I can play all of my synths with it. I can also record the midi out of it, into Ableton so I can fully sync anything with whatever project I’m working on when I want to specifically record the microKORG. The synth was my brother’s - one of many pieces of gear I cherish & hold onto dearly. I spoke a bit last week about another piece of gear of his that I took out of storage recently.
When recording experiments from raw analog oscillators, without the use of quantizers or the very simple tuner tool in Ableton, tuning can be an annoying distraction as it takes a bit of effort to get things in tune with the perfect pitch of a digital synth such as the microKORG. This is an issue I run into all the time in the studio & is part of the fun for me - I enjoy doing it by ear, sometimes the slight imperfections sound really nice. This led me down the path of programming a couple of patches on the microKORG because I was trying to tune it by ear so that it would sit melodically with the sequence I had recorded earlier. Programming this thing is something I usually shy away from because it’s annoying & tedious. There are a lot of synths out there that have simpler designs & easier ways to program & mangle sounds but this one just sounds really nice. I love the digital character of it & it has a lot of modulation possibilities which can give you really beautiful pads, arps, etc. that are full of life & depth. The filters sound amazing too, I love how sharp & liquid sounding the resonance can get without ruining your ears like some other filters.
A few more hours of tinkering later & all of the sudden I had a full track come together with mostly sounds programmed from the microKORG (other than one drum loop + melodic sequence from my modular). Here’s a 2 minute clip of it:
A few of my tracks in the past have been the result of hyper focusing on one piece of gear but this time I was thinking about how a friend of a friend, Love Over Entropy, did an entire album with a Yamaha DX 11. This album completely floored me when my friend Gilles sent it the other day. It’s releasing at the end of February on SoHaSo but snippets can be heard here.
Anyway, I’m excited to spend more time this winter focusing a bit more on the microKORG. Little bits of it can be heard sprinkled across some of my music over the past few years but I’m eager to dive deeper, to familiarize myself with the nuances & quirks that make it such a legendary piece of gear.
P.S. I’ll share a full stream of the track I did in my chat for paid subscribers.