It’s the 15th of #jamuary2023! Mid-way-ish through the month, and time for a new synth to play with! We’ll be starting this week out with the Korg opsix altered FM synthesizer. And what a neat beast it is!
This week’s jam is a little more “produced” than most of the previous ones. To start with, I wanted to be able to maintain a stereo path throughout, and so needed to use a different looper. The only other real looper I have at the moment is a Boss RC-3, which can make some very long loops, but I really don’t like using it because it’s a “one-button” looper, and I really prefer having a separate button for some controls. It’s also set up with a different operational order than the G3n. That lead to a couple of accidental overdubs, and some odd volume swells. But I liked the loop otherwise, and decided to “fix it in post”. That meant doing some production in Ableton Live for this one.
No worries. I used Live to record two different stereo tracks of the loop, offset in time so most of the major volume dips are accounted for. And then I recorded the “second lead” track and finally, the actual lead part.
As far as loopers go, I’m still narrowing the field for an upgrade to my hardware looper situation. In the meantime, I think I can gently modify the RC-3 into a usable-by-me single track/single section two-button looper. Yes, I have a soldering iron, and I’m not afraid to use it!
I also wanted to retain the Zoom G3n’s Ice Delay and Particle Reverb, so I put them in an “effects loop” from the Behringer Flow 8, though it doesn’t have a real effects loop, so I had to use a monitor send and a stereo input pair. So, for the backing loops and the secondary lead line, I recorded the master outputs of the Flow 8.
For the actual lead, I just had to use a “classic” FM piano sound, and I recorded it with just very light internal opsix effects, and then used Ableton’s beautiful Echo audio effect set up with offset stereo repeats, creating kind of a lopsided ping-pong effect.
That’s pretty much it, though you can expect some pretty wild sounds over the course of this week, including a possible attempt at making the opsix sound like a SOMA Lyra-8 with it’s effects section working overtime. We’ll see how that goes …
I hope you’re enjoying the music, and I also hope you’re enjoying the variety of music being made by others. Here, again, are the links to #jamuary2023 content on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook:
Jamuary2023 on YouTube
Jamuary2023 on Instagram
Jamuary2023 on Facebook