If you take two seconds to listen to the track, I bet you can get the general idea behind where the title of this one came from.
First off: the Volca Beats is criminally underrated as a drum machine. It’s actually a decent drum machine, despite all the hate it gets for whatever reason. Just want to put that out there and get that out of the way.
Anyways. Acid bass!
The patch involved here is actually fairly interesting. I was more or less just messing around on the Monologue, and ended up making this odd patch that’s both a kick drum and an acid bass at once.
The acid part’s fairly easy, the Monologue’s got a real squelchy filter if you crank the resonance, and you can run a sawtooth wave through it with some filter movement to get a real nice 303-esque acid bass. That’s exactly what I did here. The one thing to note, is that the way I’m playing with the filter cutoff is through the LFO on the Monologue, not the actual VCF. You can set the LFO to 1-shot, and it will run through a single cycle of the waveshape it’s set to, and then stop. In this case, I have it set to ramp-down, and I’m tweaking with the actual speed of the LFO to keep the filter open for longer or shorter periods of time.
The reason that’s necessary is because I rediscovered the old-school way of synthesizing a kick drum: take a sine wave (or triangle wave, in this case, since that’s the closest thing the Monologue has), and give it a fast pitch-envelope. Boom, instant kick drum. So how did I get this and the acid bass at once?
Well, the Monologue has two oscillators, and a thing I keep forgetting you can target with the envelope generator is only the pitch of oscillator 2. So I can have the first oscillator be my acid bass, and the second be my kick drum, using some clever routing to make both the kick drum sweep and the filter movement for the bass tweakable during the performance.
Everything else was centered around this. The PO-20 is something I’ve been using a lot to try and force myself to be more creative (it’s a thing with many limitations, and I find limitation breed creativity), the NTS-1 plays extremely well with the PO-20 as an FX box (and allowed me to use the chord drone) , and if I’m doing this weird acid-y thing down low with the digital stuff up top, I’m going to want a nice little classic-sounding analog drum box doing percussion (the Volca Beats was practically screaming “Pick me! Pick me!” at that point"), and from there it was all just making a jam that felt right.
I’m definitely using that acid-kick patch late on in something else later on down the line, it’s a lot of fun.