Korg Stuff and Sweat
Here is sample of a track that I’m currently working on, “Sweat”.
Sweat (WIP 1) by Travis Estrella
Most of the tracks besides the pads and drums are from the Korg Kaossilator. I’m restringing my guitar to throw down a crunchy riff for the last half of the song. I also plan to use either my NI Maschine or my DR-880 for better drums.
Last week I purchased the Korg Kaossilator because I was fed up with trying to find a cheaper solution to achieve the same effect. The Kaossilator is a phrase based synthesizer – it offers a ton preset sounds to manipulate through a large X/Y pad. Most of the presets use the X/Y pad for note (x) and filter (y) but some offer other combinations. There are 100 sound presets that cannot be altered from factory. 20 Leads, 10 Acoustic, 20 Bass, 10 Chordal, 20 Effects, 10 Drum, 10 Drum Pattern Preset (although both drum categories feature different sounds and rhythms within each preset). On top of that, you can apply one out of 50 a gated arp patterns to any preset sound, sometimes changing the dynamic of how the sound is played entirely. The Kaossilator (pronounced Chaos-sil-lator, like oscillator) has 31 scale types, including blues, pentatonic, fifths, octaves, and a whole bunch of eastern scale types. These can be set to any key between 2 octaves.
The best (and worst) feature of the Kaossilator is it’s loop recording mode. It will record up to a 2 bar loop. You can set the BPM (beats per minute) and the gate/arp and drum patterns will follow (although cannot adjust the BPM of what you’ve recorded). You can stack an infinite number of sounds. The bad news is that the notes and patterns that you lay down are not quantized to the BPM unless you stop the recording and hold down the pattern/note as you start record again. This will stay in sync until you lift your finger.
Here are two loops I made:
Kaossilator Test 2 by Travis Estrella
Kaossilator Test 1 by Travis Estrella
This brings me to the point that the Kaossilator is a pain in the ass to record. Standalone, the device is fun to play, but every time I’ve come up with something cool, there is no way to save the loop, much less gather the individual layers. Turning it off erases everything. There is no MIDI in/out so syncing to a DAW is tough. I’ve managed to set up Ableton Live to emulate the loop recording of the Kaossilator in order to not only go beyond the 2 bar loop limit, but also record each layer separately. The downside is I have to be very exact on the first beat in order to get a good loop going.
There are easter eggs in the Kaossilator, such a 16 beat/4 bar mode [hold down the record and tempo buttons when turning on] but this prevents re-syncing as once the recorder is launched and you can only add sounds to the on-going loop. The extra memory is being taken from the fix function, which saves an extra loop recording to memory. Another easter egg is the Battery checker [hold down gate/arp, record, and tempo when turning on], but at the first batch batteries I wore out, this failed to register as low.
The Kaossilator strength is definitely in live performance. If you give some forethought, you can perform an entire electronic song with breaks, different parts, beat rolls, etc. The trick is to use the record mode efficiently. Record the drum and bass lines and fix them to memory. Then as you build up the song, you can selectively erase parts that aren’t fixed to memory allowing some complex buildups and breakdowns. You can also adjust the bar length during playback to do creative beat repeats and rolls. While the loop is playing, you can use the current preset to solo a long complex melody over everything. You can selectively erase or record slivers of presets to give the song a very glitchy feel. The pad itself, while seemly single touch, will average two fingers down – putting one finger down on the left will produce the lower octave root note, then put down the second finger on the far right, the note will roll to the middle octave (center), then release the left finger will roll the note to the far right to the higher octave root note. Selecting a specific note can be frustrating, sometimes the Kaossilator will trill between two notes. By putting the gate/arp on a long pattern usually will remedy this.
All in all, not bad for a device that can be thrown into a bag and taken anywhere. I just hope the next generation Kaossilator will have a slot for a memory card to save out loops (if only just to be able to recall them from the device). Separate loop tracks with mute and solo – eight would be a good number. 16 beats per loop up to 4 or 8 bars, optionally quantized. And some sort of MIDI syncing.
