Alright, day one!
This one' started with me wanting to use the Monologue a bit more. I’ve felt like I’ve been neglecting it of late, and boy did that prove to be a mistake.
The Korg Monologue holds a special place in my heart, as it’s the first hardware synth I ever bought. I’ve used it on a number of different tracks, it does everything from leads to wonderful synth brass to experimental stuff to really gritty basses.
Speaking of really gritty basses, that’s what I’m using it for here!
So the fun thing about the Monologue is how easy it is for me to sit down and patch something pretty quickly, so I patched a bass here with the right amount of sub and grit to be able to be fun, and sequenced a quick repeating bass to use as a sort of pedal point.
From here, I figured out sone harmonies on the Volca Keys, which I’m learning to love these days. Lovely little box, and the three voices force me to think about slightly simpler harmonies instead of just using 7th chords or 6/9 chords for everything.
Drums were next, sequenced something with the PO-12 Rhythm from Teenage Engineering. This thing was a gift from my mother last Chirstmas, and it’s seen a fair amount of use in my setup. It’s probably jockeying with the Drumbrute Impact for the title of my favorite drum machine in my repertoire. There’s not too much explaining that needs to go on about this bit, the thing’s small but packs a hell of a punch and I used it to lay down a somewhat heavy beat over the current bits and pieces.
The last bit here is I think the part that made things all actually come together, was the idea of using the NTS-1 to double-up on the bass, and to turn on the arpeggiator part of the way through.
Now, the idea here stemmed from a thing I’ve been using in a few different tracks lately, which was in turn inspired by Loopop’s generative MIDI video (specifically the segment about parallel MIDI chains), and that’s setting up a bunch of MIDI FX in nested groups so that I can press one key, and make a lot of other stuff happen. I have a track called Mindspace in the works at the time of writing this where I do this to layer some hand bells samples in this nice rhythmic arpeggiation over a bassline, and I’ve got another jam performance where I do the same thing with the NTS-1, just in a slightly different manner and context. Here, it’s the same concept, only using the octave chord shape, and the VPM oscillator, which is essentially a variant of FM synthesis that gets you some really interesting and inharmonic sounds.
After figuring out my routing, and what needed FX and what didn’t (thank you Korg for making the NTS-1 an amazing little FX box!), and the general flow of the jam in terms of performance, all that needed to happen was the performance. This only took about two or three tries to get right, honestly, and I felt it was a strong start to the challenge.