Volca Sample beats

Exercise in Korg Volca Sample – sample import, creativity and a few concepts testing.

I have a Korg Volca Sample for some time but haven’t played that much with it due to the complicated way of getting the sound in. I have tried the Vosyr but to me it force you to do a lot on a PC in advance and the loading times of the whole memory sets is a killer. I am more towards shorter samples a moment of surprise when switching samples and also slightly not knowing what exactly is in the sample memory.

I have created a simple web app with chromatic keyboard and more features coming later.

Now that I really want the Elektron Model:Cycles i was thinking “Play with what you have and don’t spend on more gear”. So I did. And lately I have found that the native iOS app for sample transfere AudioPocket supports importing from iCloud. That’s great because it makes the sample import process way easier and you are able to do it computer-less. Well you still need an iOS device. But it works!

While working with my iPhone7 and AudioPocket i tried to sample a few things from the iPhone mic. And at first I was very disappointed. I was monitoring the results from the phone speaker and it was noisy and bad. Later I checked the recorded samples on headphones and there were a lot less noise and obviously better sound overall. Trust me I have home studio gear and know how to use it. But with a 2 year old kid around, less and less time for music you want to be quick, simple but still have fun. That’s why I try to use as less gear, wires, computers as possible.

The results below are two tracks – loops just for fun. I was trying a few things here.

Track 1 – have one sample with the entire drumset of 808 style sounds. It is chopped on different track for kick, snare and hi hats by sample start and length. Track starts with a kick from this set and iPhone recorded sample of a child wooden block xylophone together with recorded ukulele sample (same in track 2) that is reversed and pitched up. Then comes in a sample from an E-MU Morpheus pad set ( https://rhythm-lab.com/e-mu-morpheus-samples/ ) tuned and filtered to taste. Finally there is a ticking sample of recorded Korg Monotron that is looped to match the tempo of the beat simulating a delay effect with set decay and some automation. Recording of Monotron from speaker to iPhone mic is fun but noisy. The sound is filtered to get rid off that. But for sound effects its usable.

Track 2 – have a recorded kick sample from an inflatable balloon “kicked” with a finger. Hi hat and snare are some generic samples. There is also a sampled ukulele (same as in track 1) and the bass sound is looped single cycle waveform (FM synth sound) with some envelope that is copied to two tracks and slightly detuned for fatness.

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