Welcome back to SongBuilder! This is the series where we take a selection of amazing Korg gear and build a track episode by episode.
It’s episode five and we’re back with Modwave, layering a choppy, rhythmic synth sound with our track, and animating the sound with some incredible Kaoss Physics.
For our fifth instalment of this season’s SongBuilder, we’re turning to the Modwave wavetable synthesizer for inspiration! We’ve found a great preset called Crystalgazer that will add exactly the right flavour of choppy synth pattern that we’re looking for.
This particular Performance on Modwave is a great way to introduce some rhythmic synth textures to our track, as well as using the amazing Kaoss Physics feature to morph the sound as it’s playing.
Kaoss Physics is an evolution of Korg’s revolutionary Kaoss Pad technology allowing musicians to not only feel their way through sound via a pad interface, but also to create incredibly unique textures by modelling a ball that can be launched by your finger or by playing a note. This ball will then travel through a virtual 3D space, rolling over bumps, through valleys and/or bouncing off walls, modulating countless parameters as it goes!
We edited the synth sound a little with the free Modwave editor software, to make the Kaoss Physics trigger every time you play a note. This keeps the attack envelope of the sound consistent, whilst still retaining that morphing element that is such an important element of the sound’s organic nature. We also adjusted the force parameter, which gives a more immediate and dramatic effect when the sound is played.
The next step was to record our pattern into a MIDI track in Logic between bars 13 and 25. The tempo once again was synced with our DAW via USB-MIDI so that the synth’s choppy pattern would be perfectly in time with our track.
Once recorded as a MIDI region and quantized using the Piano Roll Editor in Logic, it was time to bounce that section down as an audio track. That recording was then copied and pasted into bar 25 to complete our session for today.
You can find out more about Modwave here. Join us again for the final episode of SongBuilder season five, where we will be returning to Opsix and putting the finishing touches to our track!
