I’ve been busier than usual lately, and using any down time to recover, so there hasn’t been much musical progress. I have, however, increased my instrument arsenal.

One weapon is the Microkorg XL synthesizer. It’s small – 37 mini-keys – but that’s perfect for me. I don’t have a ton of space to accomodate a full-size keyboard, these smaller units are less expensive, I’ll mostly be using one hand to do background sounds or leads, and it’s portable. Fewer keys doesn’t mean smaller range, because you can increase or decrease the pitch up to 3 octaves. It also has a vocoder, meaning you can speak or sing into a mic and have the synthesizer alter your voice, but I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of that other than goofing around at home.

I have two reasons for getting the Microkorg. The first is that I want to add background sounds to my rock songs. It’ll take some experimenting for me to determine exactly what that means. My passion is for the guitar, so that’ll remain the strongest element, and I’m sure I’ll still do all the leads on the guitar as well, but I can use the synth to add depth and interest to the music.

The second reason is for playing leads over the electronica I create on the Kaossilator. For me, the touchpad of the Kaossilator is great for setting up all the background loops, but leads have been a struggle. When I create a piece, I usually have some brief melody that I like to return to repeatedly to give the listener a rest in between the more random soloing. On the touchpad, there’s no markings of any kind, so playing the exact same series of notes in the same way every time is tough. I always end up with unintended “mistakes” that may not be noticed by anyone else, but they bother me. Having a keyboard where I can play the note I want, when I want, will be great.

My other new weapon is the new Korg DS-10 Plus virtual synthesizer for the Nintendo DSi. This was just something for fun, and I’ve only had a little time to play with it, but I’m impressed. It has a keyboard and synthesizer functions like any real synth, plus the touchpad and loop recording of the Kaossilator. But it’s even more powerful than both combined. Where the Kaossilator can record one program, the DS-10 software can record 16, and you can arrange them however you want into a full song. It also has a grid where you can turn notes on and off, either to create a melody or drum pattern, or edit one you’ve created on the keyboard or touchpad. I’m sure it has other amazing features I haven’t had time to discover yet. And I know I’ll be recording songs on this thing and posting them online.

Now I just need some time and energy….

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 9:31 am and is filed under Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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