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New Akai MPC 2500 and a few live jam videos

I picked up a second hand Akai  MPC 2500 a few ago and after tricking it out with the full 128mb of ram, a 40gb hard drive and jjosxl I’ve been having great fun breaking my musical shackles from the computer.

Ok, so the MPC is a computer but the hands on tactile feel make the whole experience much different and I’ve found the learning curve minimal given I have a strong background in music technology although I’m sure I still have much to learn as jjosxl seems to be quite deep.

Here are a few tracks I’ve uploaded to Youtube from the last week or two staring the Akai MPC 2500, Korg MS-20 Mini, Korg Volca Keys, Korg Electribe EMX1, Oberheim Matrix 1000, EMU E5000 Ultra, Roland TR-707 and a bit of delay and reverb.

Enjoy and please comment if you enjoyed them.

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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

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

Volca Beats, Keys & NI Komplete Kontrol
Volca Beats, Keys & NI Komplete Kontrol

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?