I have had the volca beats for about 3 weeks now (one of the first ones in the U.K Wohoo! ) but i've only dedicated snippets of time to it so far because i have been wrapped up in projects i started before it arrived.
Anyway i've done all that now so i had some time with it tonight, just me & it with some silly x-mini mp3 player speakers (Just for couch jammin' & checkin' out the thing)
Alright, so i won't say too much about the sounds except for this point. They ARE very basic like you probably expect & the limitations are obvious. It's apparent right from the first effort actually that i'm in a limited environment & this thing is gonna make me work to get anything worthwhile out of it. The most head-doing thing for me is that it is very grid like with the sequencers steps in that there's no 64th's or 32nd's. That's just me though being used to an electribe esx1 as my main sequencer. It's not a negative feature though because of the rest of the machine's tools that give you the work arounds & an alternative way of doing things.
Getting the beats down & editing steps is the easy part & the owners manual (A small sheet of paper) is a good reference for those 'volca beats specifics' only.The rest is obvious to a practiced sequencer user.
It's the whole package you have to look at if you want to make drum patterns that have some more fluid attributes. Well , since there are not many tools on board
, It's all down to that 'STUTTER' section, the tool that re-triggers 1 or all drum part sounds & makes a delay kind of effect...It's your friend ! AND combine it with ''MOTION SEQUENCES' which are actually for the most part the turn of 1 or 2 knobs for the stutter & a choice of knobs for the drum parameters.The stutter though is what delivers the most overall effect & if you perform a motion sequence with it on just 1 drum sound at a time you can create the illusion of swing in the mix by applying say appropriate amounts of stutter at selected speeds & at selected points in the sequence.
I used an old trick to get more variety out of it. Slow down the tempo, put extra beats where you want them to make up the bpm's again & then start chucking motion sequences at individual drum parts in different intervals of the 16 steps & before you know it there's something amusing created...It starts getting quite good.
What i have found so far though is that there's only so far i can go with it before i've had enough because i'm used to more features & my head & hands are reaching for further tools...which are not there. but saying that, it will happily sit there & bang out your rhythm for for you while you get on with a lead or a bass & when you mix one of those with it, the whole mix comes to life & the sweet spot is hit ! Sweet !
That's most of my findings so far, i have had it playing through some Yamaha hs80m's in my small world & it sounded good then. It's bound to sound better still over a bigger sound system .I didn't expect much from this little box & there are better sounding cheap drum machines out there .I think some of the older little machines like the the yamaha mr10 for example had some better sounds & what would make the volca beats better for me would be some innovative modifications that would add further timbres & most of all, a tidy midi out. That's just me though & my view should not put anyone off. It's way cool for the money & the retro touch pad is excellent & a pleasure to use.
Havn't recorded it yet but that will come soon. It would be good if other keen volca beats owners shared their new tricks & stuff here !
