This is a another little experient mucking about with my Korg Volca Keys and the Arturia Keystep. The Volca is running a little sequence I slapped together while on the Keystep I added some nice malingering chords from a church organ soft synth in Ableton Live. Yes, basically keeping it simple, like what I am ;)
Incidentally, the cover art is a repeated shot of some of the amazing stained glass windows in Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Toulouse which I recent visited on my honeymoon.
Yes, we are back again with some more mucking about synths and general sonic experimentation. Basically it's more ambient messing about. This time done with a sequenced Korg Volca Keys playing through a Valhalla delay, with some Ableton soft synth action improvised on an Arturia Keystep. Anyway here's the link to the tune, and I'll tell you a bit more about it below...
Having always enjoyed assorted electronica and similar music, and very much in the spirit of "sod I'm 50 soon", I'd decided it was high time to explore the world of music-making with synthesizers. So then, my first step was to get a midi controller - a means of entering notes, chords etc. into a computer. As previously mentioned in this series of little posts, I opted for an Arturia Keystep. Now not only is this a fantastic keyboard but it also comes with some very useful software for the novice -a complete DAW.
And what the hell is a DAW when it's at home? Well, it stands for Digital Audio Workstation, and basically we are talking a whole recording studio in software form. Now if you are anything like me, there'll be one burning question above all others - and that is how do you pronounce DAW? If I refer to one by spelling out the letters, as in "D. A. W." will I sound like a total berk? Or should I be making the acronym a word -"daw" - and risk sounding like a demented crow? Well, having watched a boat-load of videos on various instruments and music-making, I can report that both appear to be in common use, so you can stop worrying about that. Personally I prefer "daw", as I quite like sounding like a demented crow...
Anyhow, the Keystep come with a free copy of Ableton Live Lite 10, which is not only the usual studio-in-a-box but also is designed as a performance program for the gigging musician (hence the Live in the name). Now again speaking as a total novice and an absolute musical moron, so far I've found Ableton to be a very friendly program to use. Yes, there are tons of menus and things to fiddle with, but the interface is well designed to fit on a single screen, and everything is arranged to be easy to find quickly. You can even have a handy help box open in the layout which will tell you what everything is when you point at it. Very nice feature for those of us just starting out! Moreover, I got the Keystep connected to Ableton very quickly and painlessly (i.e. plugged in the USB and the program found it no problem), and soon worked out setting up different audio channels and how to record something. Now while Ableton comes with a ton of virtual instruments, having picked up a tiny (and very cheap) mini-synth - the Korg Monotron Delay (more on which another day), I found there was a special kind of magic in having physical controls to create all manner of synthy goodness. While with virtual instruments you can adjust dials with your mouse, it's not quite the same as doing it by hand - old school knob-twiddling feels so much more expressive. Hence I started looking about for a small starter synth. As it was I plumped for one of the the Monotron's bigger brothers, the Volca Keys also made by Korg. Again, I shall have to write about my adventures with the Keys in more detail at a later date, but basically the Keys is a small (and again cheap) analogue synth with its own little sequencer built in. Being a product of both analogue technology and from veteran electronic instrument makers Korg, the Keys serves up a variety of pleasing old school synth sounds, and hence I was keen to test it out. It didn't take long to figure out how to program a sequence and again it was very easy to plug it into the Ableton and record it. Now the Keys does have a delay effect built in, and while it is serviceable, it is a bit limited. Hence I started hunting around for a delay plug-in for the DAW. Now when it comes to reverbs and delays that play well with synths, one name kept coming up - Valhalla (links below). And they very kindly have a free basic plugin to download and play with. Which I did and liked enormously - I suspect I shall have to get some digital kit from these good folks! Anyhow with the sequence playing and sounding fantastic through the Valhalla delay, it was time to test the Keys out and record something. As I said, there is a certain magic to physical kit, in particular synths which are so much about sculpting the sound through assorted dials and knobs. Hence as the sequence I played, I went to town with the Key's array of controls, modulating the sound live. I was pleased with the results, but it still needed something. And so as another little experiment, this time in recording with Ableton, I laid down a second track of improvised chords with one of the virtual synths in the DAW. Finally all that remained was a little muck about with some recording utilities - basically fiddled with stereo setting of the mix so that one synth was closer to the centre - and the track was done!
So then, as my sonic offering didn't cause any outbreaks of either a) deafness and b) people shouting "for the love of Kraftwerk, STOP!", I shall continue to report on my musical meanderings...
While I haven't really a bloody clue what I'm doing, I have been rather enjoying just messing about with chords and assorted patterns of notes. For example, quite by accident, while mucking about on the Keystep the other day, I found the bassline to "Are Friends Electric?". I was delighted.
More seriously though, the Arturia Keystep is a real delight to play - the keys have a gorgeous feel to them and are properly responsive. They are velocity sensitive - so the tone of the note depends on how hard or soft you hit the key - plus it has aftertouch too, which roughly means adding additional pressure generates more of a note. So then, while the actual keys are a bit smaller, it is just like playing a proper piano! And hence, if you are looking for a midi keyboard controller, particularly if you are wanting to play a lot of stuff live as it were, I do heartily the Keystep. The sequencer and arpeggiator are a lot of fun too, but more about them another day.
Anyhow, enough of my blathering on, here's another little improvised demi-ambient piece - again just using the soft synths built into Ableton Live. Here I was just mainly testing out the Keystep, and specifically seeing what the limits of the key count was. Certainly for me, having played a little piano and electric organ in the past, the concept of having a keyboard of only 32 keys did seem a bit limiting. However the Keystep does have some easy to tap while playing buttons to shift the octave range of the keys up and down, and in practice it works rather well.
So to give this a bit of test, I did this piece somewhat traditionally - all one one track with the left hand doing chords, the right noodling little melodies. Admittedly it is very much just some chilled out sounds going search in tune for a proper tune, and probably not finding one, but hey, I'll worry about song structure another day! However the mood of these piece was very much inspired by The Mound by HP Lovecraft which I'm currently recording for the podcast (and here it is - Future Jim), trying to catch the weird beauty and melancholy of the ancient decaying city of Tsath, that lies in a great blue-litten vault, deep beneath the earth...
Anyhow here's the track -
This track is downloadable for free as an mp3 here -
As some of you may know, I've been experimenting with various synthesisers lately. As I grew up in the '80s I've always been fascinated by electronic music-making. Back then, I wanted nothing more than to make moody records with synthesizers, but only got as far as having a few lessons on an electric organ.
However as I'm turning 50 this year, it was high time I gave it go. My reasoning being that it doesn't matter if it's utter shite as no doubt any LP I would have made back circa 1982 would have been shite too!
So then, I started this ill-fated sonic odyssey by getting hold of a midi controller - basically a clever keyboard to input notes and chords into a computer. I opted for an Arturia Keystep which not only has a lovely keyboard to play (see, I did learn something in those organ lessons) but has a sequencer and an arpeggiator built-in. Very handy!
Now those two last features I didn't have much of clue about at first, so I started out just messing around with the virtual instruments in Ableton Live (which came with the Keystep) and seeing what chords I could remember...
And so then, here's a little improvised piece done while testing out the keyboard/what remains of the music I learned many years ago.
