volca beats – Retrop

9th March 201522nd September 2018

Syncing the Volca’s the DIY way. (Arduino & MCP4921 DAC)

Hello everyone.

I thought I’d share some experimentation I’ve been doing with the Arduino and a 12 bit dac (mcp4921).

I’d been looking for things I could do with it and one obvious thing that came to mind was creating a sync signal for the Volca’s.

I analysed the output of the sync signal from the SQ-1 as best I could with a multimeter and could see that the signal was peaking around 0.32 volts.

Now if I could get the dac to output a voltage somewhere in that range at a regular interval I’d be able to control the Volca’s tempo from the Arduino.

The mcp4921 connects to the Arduino via SPI. Here I’m using pins 10 (CS to dac pin 2), 11 (SDI/MOSI to dac pin 4) & 13 (CLK to dac pin 3).

The rest of the dac pins are configured as follows;

pin 1 to Arduino +5v

pin 5 to Arduino ground

pin 6 Voltage reference to Arduino +5v

pin 7 to Arduino ground

pin 8 dac output to positive on headphone jack

Arduino & MCP4921 DAC Syncer for Korg Volca's — Arduino & MCP4921 DAC Syncer for Korg Volca’s

You can download the Arduino sketch [here]

IPFS hash: QmP92HoznfndYv6Wh9zJPkWP2uvHy9zV5Tmr7QZa1rtPUk

The sketch employs a delay between setting the signal high and low which is set by the value of the variable tempo_delay. The delay is in ms and converting from bpm to the correct ms delay is simply as case of using the following formula. tempo_delay = (60,000 / BPM) /2.

Here are some rough values to get you started.

80 bpm = 376
90 bpm = 334
120 bpm = 250
126 bpm = 238

12th January 2015

Control your Volca Keys and Beats from your iPad

I’ve recently been exploring the musical possibilities of the iPad and one of my recent discoveries has been the fantastic TB MidiStuff.

It allows you to easily create touch interfaces for your MIDI devices. Combined with the wireless midi functions of the iPad and OS X and it makes controlling MIDI devices wirelessly easy enough even for me.

Tonight I sat down to explore what was on offer. I’ve got to say I’ve not even scratched the surface but in the process I created two “panels” for controlling the Volca Beats and the Volca Keys.

Unfortunately not every knob on the Volca’s is accessible from MIDI. The Volca Keys is missing the VCF Peak and the Beats is missing some of the most useful for shaping the sound, the kick click, pitch and decay, snare snap, pitch and decay, tom hi pitch, tom lo pitch. Obviously this has been done to save costs but it still gives us plenty to twiddle with.

Download panel for Korg Volca Beats

Download panel for Korg Volca Keys

Please let me know if you find any problems and I’d love to hear if anyone uses it.

John

11th January 2015

MIDI presets for Volca Keys and Beats for NI Komplete Kontrol keyboard

I wanted to share a few templates I’ve made for the Volca Beats and Volca Keys for the NI Komplete Kontrol S25 keyboard.

So far I can’t see how to use to assign more than 8 knobs per template so I’ve had to split them out across multiple template.

This is a major blow as so far it looks like you’ll need to take your hands off the keyboard and use your mouse to select between templates. Controller values will also rest to 0 when changing from template to template.

This could be fixed if we could use the bank select button next to the knobs but NI knows best. Hmmm.

I’ll be sure to update this post if I manage to overcome the seemingly bonkers restriction.

Here’s a list of the midi controls the volca’s offer:

Volca Keys

Download patch

PORTAMENTO
EXPRESSION
VOICE
OCTAVE
DETUNE
VCO EG INT
CUTOFF
VCF EG INT
LFO RATE
LFO PITCH INT
LFO CUTOFF INT
EG ATTACK
EG DECAY/RELEASE
EG SUSTAIN
DELAY TIME
DELAY FEEDBACK

Volca Beats

Download patch

PART LEVEL ADJUSTMENTS
(KICK, SNARE, LO TOM, HI TOM, CL HAT,
OP HAT, CLAP, CLAVES, AGOGO, CRASH)
PCM SPEED
(CLAP, CALVES, AGOGO, CRASH)
STUTTER TIME
STUTTER DEPTH
TOM DECAY
CLOSED HAT DECAY
OPEN HAT DECAY

Annoyingly there is no option for kick or snare pitch or decay. Could there be a way to mod this?