Let's make some ambient music, while the UK is pummelled by a storm that most other nations would laugh at. The dominant sound here is Valhalla Software's Supermassive VST reverb, which has a melancholic quality because it's so good. It makes everything sound wonderful, but it also reveals that a lot of dark ambient music from the 1990s - by the likes of Total, Lull, Thomas Köner et al - was just a lot of samples fed through a contemporary high-quality reverb unit with the mix control at 100%. There was no magic, no special studio wizardry. Just samples put through a Lexicon something-or-other and cut into CD-length sections.
Beyond the reverb this track has three instruments. The Korg Volca Modular is generating the low bassline, with a patch that constantly modulates, which gives the resulting reverb-laden wash some texture. I'm sending the Volca Modular's sync pulse to one input of Doepfer A-166 Logic Module. An LFO is plugged into the second input of the A-166, and the resulting mixture of pulses is driving a Korg Volca Sample, which is fed through a delay. I used the Logic Module so that the Volca Sample's trigger wasn't in lock-step with the Volca.
On top of all this a trusty Arturia BeatStep is plugged into Dexed, a VST FM synthesiser. The BeatStep is generating a slow random sequence that is playing a bright tone with Dexed. This is being fed into my miniature modular synth, because I wanted to add some grit. A bit of noise. The Doepfer A-199 spring reverb is good at that.
The Volca Modular is frustrating. The combination of modules and particularly a sequencer make it punch above its weight class, but it has problems. Some little ones. The low-pass gate has a narrow usable range. The second low-pass gate is difficult to bring into a patch without running out of physical space. It would have been nice to have a simple dedicated LFO. There's no way to output note values from the sequencer to anything else.
The biggest problem is the sound engine. Korg tried to kill two birds with one stone by combining a modular synth with an unusual FM/phase distortion/wavefolding synthesis engine, instead of an ordinary subtractive model. The synth engine is good at a narrow range of harsh keraanng-braap noises, but not much else. And there's no way to feed external audio into the signal path, so you're stuck with the internal synth engine.
It feels wrong to criticise it because whoever at Korg championed the idea was a brave soul and I wish them well. And there must have been tight financial constraints. As a sound effects generator it's terrific, and perhaps I'm being unreasonable by expecting it to churn out mysterious pads. And it's around a quarter the price of a MakeNoise 0-Coast. Etc. Nonetheless I find it hard to love.
In the end the snow didn't settle. It's still too warm.
