Korg Kaossilator

cavedave

Has anyone used one of these? They look like fun and only cost about 130 euro.




As a general note what do you use for making weird and wonderful sounds?

Setun

This is an AMAZING piece of kit. BUY ONE!
And no I'm not a Korg rep :pac:

It's freakin amazing what you can do with it. Build beats/ bass lines/ melodies. It has a great arpeggiator. Also you can pick any scale, with a load of different scale patterns (pentatonic/ major/minor/indian etc etc) when making melodies. Lovely piece of kit.

cavedave

They also seem to do a program for the DS. It seems to be Japan only at the moment. Not sure if its any good but there is an album made by it here.

In order to avoid pimping this particular company is there anything else similar done by anyone else?

Setun

Tenori-On.

:eek:

jiltloop

would love a few of these audio cubes, they'd look great in a live set up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWdBYxkh9XU&feature=related

cavedave

if you want to be cheap your can make your own

Actually if there are any makers here beat blocks are really cool

Id say you could use some arduino's to recreate them.

Setun

Yeah the beat blocks wouldn't be so hard to make with an arduino.

Does the tenori-off have midi-functionality?

Jay P

Do you need an external music source for the Kaossilator?

John

I think so, I think it just processes sound. I've seen a Kaoss pad used with a guitar before and it was pretty cool: guitarist laid guitar flat and put an ebow on the string and just tinkered with the Kaoss pad to make really cool noises (that fit with the song).

Setun

Jay P wrote: »

Do you need an external music source for the Kaossilator?

Nope, the kaossilator is a standalone music production station, to use korg market-speak. It's a drum machine and synth (with arpegiattor) all in one.

Basically you can program a drum loop (can't remember the max sampling time), then lay down a few other drum or synth layers on top by resampling. Unfortunately there's no CF or SD card slots so you can't save loops unless you've got a sampler or something aswell.

There's a load of synth sounds built in, and a load of scale patterns programmed also so it's all controlled via the touchpad. Great piece of kit, even if its just a kind of game boy for musicians

John

Oh cool, I thought it was just a little multi-effects type thing. I'm more interested now!

Setun

Yeah about 3 or 4 of my mates have one. They're unreal, and a good price too. I don't know if I'd use it standalone for anything more than fun though - it is a powerful piece of kit, but maybe the 2.0 version might be more "professional" if you know what I mean. Definitely worth getting though if you want some fun music production hardware.

Ghost Rider

I own a Kaossilator and use it quite a bit - mainly as a basic drum machine. I think it's aimed primary at people who have no keyboard skills yet want to play a synthesizer - hence the inclusion of a Kaoss-style touchpad. I guess the thinking is that the touchpad is a more user friendly interface than a keyboard. But I don't think that's true. How could it be easier to pick out a melody on a surface where you cannot see the positioning of the "keys" (ie the Kaossilator's touchpad) than on a surface where you can (a traditional keyboard)? If Korg had included some kind of illuminated grid, that would have made a big difference. But they didn't; instead the Kaossilator's "screen" remains blank.

It has a built-in sequencer/looper but it is very basic. The loop has to last 16 bars (no longer, no shorter) and the bar length is determined by the BPM. Adding to the loop on the fly is easy but subtracting from it is impossible, something that irritates me a little.

Finally, many of the sounds are very "dance oriented" and it feels like the device is slanted in favour of people who want to produce rather conventional dance music. I would love it if Korg would bring out a more customisable version, with which you could tamper with the pre-sets a bit more. In general, the Kaossilator is designed to get you up and running quickly. The downside of that is that it doesn't offer a lot to those of us who want to get "under the hood" in a bid to make more unusual sounds.

Those negatives aside, it is a fun tool to mess around with.Some of the "acoustic" sounds (of which there are not many, it must be said) are surprisingly nice. Particularly interesting too is the inclusion of all sorts of non-Western scales, making it relatively easy to can sound a bit like a low-rent Ravi Shankhar on his lunchbreak...

cavedave

Hi Ghost Rider just on the off chance you have not seen this hack

If you power up the Kaossilator while holding down the Tap and Loop Rec buttons, the loop memory doubles from two bars to four

Ghost Rider

I hadn't. Cheers for the tip. (I thought the default memory was 16 bars - maybe it's 16 beats...?)

cavedave wrote: »

Hi Ghost Rider just on the off chance you have not seen this hack

cavedave

Wired have an article on odd instruments. Makezine this month have an article on how to make a laser harp. I cannot imagine it is a great instrument though.

The tremolo effect they give the schematics for (using an LED, LDR and spinning partially blacked out disk) does sound cool though. Does anyone else here make musical instruments or effects?