Saturday, February 20, 2010

House Tour and Kaossilator Demo


Since Kat came last weekend and gave me some great advice on how to arrange my little apartment, it finally feels like home. I took some photos and made a folder on Picasa for anybody who's interested in seeing how it came together. The older I get, the more fussy my living arrangements, and I love it. I can't believe I lived with other people for so long. There are still some things to fix up here and there but it's great to finally have a livable space again.

From Boise Apartment Photos

Of all my finds over the past couple of years, one of my favorites by far is my map of the southeast US from the Alameda antiques fair. I got an amazing deal on it and I love how it looks perfect in my living area. I also couldn't wait to share this:

From Boise Apartment Photos

This is my new toy, the KORG Kaossilator dynamic phrase synthesizer. It's basically a touchpad-controlled loop generator, and it is the most awesome purchase I've made in a long, long time. It's got a ton of voices/sound effects/drum hits/preset drum patterns, and it gives you complete control of BPM and loop length (anywhere from 1/32 of a beat to 8 full beats), as well as 31 different scales, 49 different gate arpeggiators that sound the selected sample at different intervals of the beat, and the ability to record loops and layer them. I've had so much fun with it the past couple of weeks that I figured I would post some quick (~20 second) samples to give you an idea of how easy it is to lose hours playing with this thing.



Starting out with the 'flap' lead running through gate arpeggiator 09. 'Egyptian' scale, 145 bpm.


Adding a BD/SD3 drum hit to each downbeat.


Layering on the 'auto techno' drum pattern using one of the more basic presets.


Testing out the trance chord before adding it to the other fixed layers.


Fixed the trance chord with a surge in the cutoff during the second bar. At this point I was set. I played around with this backing track for at least half an hour.


Playing with the low-frequency oscillation on a sweep sound effect.

From Boise Apartment Photos

3 comments:

Debbie said...

I LOVE your place! So sunshiney and warm and restful. I am so glad you have Malcolm to add some companionship as you wait expectantly for the future.

Smurfblood said...

Save up your money and try this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RchEHThVR-8

Actually, it looks like a real time killer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKHIcOqd21Q

Smurfblood said...

Hey is that Nagel-looking portrait of Soft Cell? Sorry, my mind is still stuck in the '80s.