Korg Forums

[Moth]

I'm trying to edit the sound of my bass guitar with the MicroKorg in realtime. What's the best way to go about doing this? At the moment I have it in the AUDIO IN 1 and am using the vocoder and AUDIO setting on OSC 1 to hear it. My question is

1. Can I change the waveform of the sound? When its set to AUDIO on OSC 1 I obviously cannot, so is there another way? I was thinking, if there was a way to do the vocoder without distortion (so that it just plays the audio exactly as it sounds), I can mess around with it from there. Does anyone know how to do this?

2. How do I play it so I don't have to hold the key down to hear it?

[X-Trade]

1. you can not directly change the actual waveform of an imstrument, because it is live sampling data and not directly synthesized. however. you can alter the sound in various ways.

First of all, don't use the vocoder. Vocoder is best for processing voices, and usually takes away the pitch of the sound you are inputting, so you play the pitch with the keys.

instead, you should try a normal program. try the following:
- set OSC1 to audio in, and set the balance to the audio input you are using for your guitar
- set changing OSC1 level will give you the direct level from the sound
- you can now use the sync or ring mod on oscillator two. you can create some great effects with this. make sure to turn up oscillator 2 on the mixer. you may even want to turn off oscillator 1 completely on the mixer so you get a very 'wet' sound.
- you can also use the filters to lighten/darken the sound, and induce resonance.
- you can use distortion in the amp section to warp the sound even further
- use the LFOs and mod wheel and virtual patches to make other modulations and such.
- use the effects (e.g. ensemble, delay)

this is much better than the vocoder, because the way a vocoder works, it basically analyses the level of many different frequency bands on the input, and then compares these with the levels analysed from a synthesizer wave (the one you set for OSC1. so in your previous attempt, you could have been vocoding the guitar with itself!!).
it then uses the levels it has worked out to re-synthesize each band e.g. a sine wave at each frequency band at the specific level.
so the input sound is in no way directly sent out. it is compeltely resynthesized, thus impossible to remove the 'distortion' that the vocoder makes from the original sounds.

2.
the best way to do this is with the arp. set it to latch, and set the arp mode to 'TRG'. which will repeat whatever you press. also be sure to set the gate time to 100%. you may also want to set the voice mode to mono allthough this isn't entirely necesary.
further, you can now use the EGs as another form of LFO by playing with the attack, decay and sustain (But not release) parameters.