Welcome to today's edition of numberers nerds out beyond compare! Ever since I was a kid, I made music to some degree. Let's take a quick look at the instruments that took me on my journey and that shaped me into who I am! We are gonna go through them in an anachronical order because I want to start with a real banger of an instrument. Two core lessons to take away from this blog post are:
Cheap gear can be wonderful
Limitations breed creativity
Instrument and Interface: The Minichord
The Minichord is a very fascinating instrument and more! It is the spiritual successor to the Omnichord series of instruments. It takes the Omnichord, fabricated by Suzuki, into the modern age with more modern connections and a synth engine editor, but we are getting ahead of ourselves!
The Omnichord is a synthesizer that kind of looks like a tennis racket. It is a synthesizer from the 80s and is spiritually closer to a guitar than a keyboard per se. Instead of playing individual notes per key, you play entire chords by pressing a chord button. Then you can use the strum plate to pluck and strum the selected chord. In fact, you can undulate your finger over the strum plate and you will essentially be strumming the chord up and down across several octaves. You can see how the playing style aligns more with that of a guitar. There are several entries in the Omnichord series, and some have more features than others, but that is the general gist.
The Minichord is much smaller and completely open source. If you wanted to, you could personalize this instrument in depths you can only imagine. And funny enough, it also acts as a MIDI controller, meaning you can control all your freaky synths by strumming. I know! That's so cool right? And the internal sound engine is incredibly customizeable and I haven't even gone into sound designing on this platform. Gosh, such a cool tiny instrument!
I have actually used the Minichord in three different songs!
In the first two videos, I improvise using the stock sounds on the Minichord and send them through my DIY Kaoss Pad that I will talk about later. In the Soundcloud embed, I use the Minichord to control a piano and an arpeggiated bass in my DAW. This device really leads to inspiration. There is so much fucking around to do, and yet even more finding out!
And guess what, the Minichord does not cost you an arm and a leg, no. Manufactured by Seeed Studio, a creator of niche electronic components, this thingamajig costs 169.00 USD. And if you wanted to, you could just 3d-print and route all the components yourself (given you have the right equipment).
The software interface is graphically minimalistic, yet unboundedly allpowerful. You can get neck deep into the sound design and modify and modulate ever parameter.
The Minichord also comes with a built in arpeggiator but I have not wrapped my head around it yet.
The Past: Casio Keyboards
One of my first musical instruments ever was a small toy xylophone for kids. It did its job! It was in the chromatic C scale, it taught me about common intervals, and music is all about intervals. I massively enjoyed this toy! Similarly I also had access to a small toy (key-)harmonica. I was able to apply what I learned on the xylophone there since it has the exact same control layout. Except this one, you control with your breath of course. It sounded nasty and screechy but hell it was fun!
My first "real", i.e. non-toy, instrument was a wooden recorder flute. The control scheme frustrated me. Some notes are really hard to play! You have to cover the holes in the recorder with some seriously warped hand poses. I remember the G was the worst. I have no clue where my old recorder is right now. Good riddance, wooden torture device!
I don't remember what model my first electronic keyboard was. It was a small toy Casio keyboard that only had a few presets on it. Casio doesn't sell keyboards of that size and limited feature set any more. This is the closest thing I could find. The little thing would be the bane of everyone elses existence, as I had a lot of fun playing the demo song (a techno/eurodance version of Ode To Joy) over and over and over and over again.
My first real professional keyboard was an absolute banger of an instrument, and it too is unfortunately not being sold anymore, and it's spiritual successor are.... kind of lame. It was a Casio WK-3300. And it was the perfect keyboard at the right time.
High quality pcm samples that you could layer on top of each other and play together! You could split the keyboard and have the left hand play a different instrument than the right hand. I don't think this keyboard had any real synthesis engine in there, but it had a whole bunch of the many features that were prevalent in the keyboards of its time. Important for me was: it had an LCD Display that told you what you were playing - that made reading note sheets and playing them really easy. It had a whole plethora of digital effects, many distortions, delays, reverbs, ring modulators, and so on and so forth, all with customizable parameters. You could pick two instruments (from hundreds) and layer them on top of each other, and then apply effects to them, giving you a mean mean sound design machine.
It also came with a whole bunch of background grooves and styles, but I wasn't all that interested in that. Rather than that, I would try and utilize the recording capabilities of the device. You could layer a few tracks together this way, giving you a weird reacharound way of avoiding the need for a DAW entirely.
I used this keyboard for many many years and recorded a few things on it. It lasted such a long time. I poured many a coffee over it (accidentally). I learned many a Muse song on it. I taught myself Neutron Star Collision, Starlight, Uprising, Resistance, yada yada, ALL the Muse songs. I learned Citizen Erased (which is still SUCH a banger song! Matt Bellamy I love you <3) I played it late at night right before my brothers school exam because uhhh I was a rascally nuisance back then. Please don't judge me. Now I would wear headphones in the same situation. It lasted for at least 15 years and carried me during this time!! Thank you Casio for all you did for me!
It pains me to say that with its price range and feature set, its exact niche has kind of died out by now. Keyboards like the WK-3300 were called "performance keyboards" and primarily targeted at street musicians. But yeah, performance keyboards nowadays are very underpowered in my opinion, and the next best more expensive thing are audio workstations which aim to entirely replace your DAW, but they cost around 4k USD or more.
The next best thing I could get to replace it was the....
Roland Go:Keys 5
I will not go too heavily into the details here but it is a really solid device! The only worthy successor to the WK-3300! It boasts actual synthesis engines, so the synth sounds sound GOOD. And the effects on this thing are delicious! A really good bitcrusher that I use all the time! It also has a very useful arpeggiator on it out of the box, and if I had a compatible microphone it would have vocoder like features (I love vocoders!!)
I have made a few recordings on this machine as well, you can find them on my Bluesky and my Instagram!
Ok let's get back to the weirder stuff!
Stompbox, No Stomping!!!
KORG is one of my favourite music gear manufacturers; what I love about them is that they truly care about the broke nerd. They want to make truly creative tools accessible to everyone. We're gonna take a look at a few KORG devices, all of which come at an amazing price point.
Kaoss Pads have a long legacy in the music world. They are very powerful multi effects processing units with great filters, bitcrushers, delays, reverbs, pan effects, distortions, choruses, etc. And the cool thing is you can chain multiple of them together and then control them via a touch pad. They do however cost upwards of 500 USD! Usually....
Enter the tiny tiny yet incredibly powerful Nu:Text NTS-3 DIY Kaoss Pad, which comes at about 160 USD! It has a way smaller form factor, which is very handy, because that means you can easily play it at the same time as the Minichord for example, with a single hand. This is a real advantage that these tiny boxes have.
A fun thing about this one is however that it is a bit of a DIY project! You screw a bunch of chips together, stick some thingamabobs onto some mcguffins, and voila, you got an instrument! For me and my brother this was a fun bonding exercise! No soldering required tho, just a tiny screwdriver!
So yeah, this tiny tiny box encompasses an entire pedalboard and puts it at your fingertips. Don't step on it though like you would on a pedal. It looks a bit too fragile for that and I hold this cutie dear to my heart!
The Best DAW Is a Resurrected Android App
Let's talk about DAWs for a second. As a nerd for all things MIDI and software and synth, a good DAW is a must have.
As a kid, the first DAW I ever tried was a kids version of Magix's Music Maker, way back in the past. I also later tried out professional versions of Music Maker. While they were a worthy introduction to the conept, they didn't stick. Also it is worth pointing out that Magix sells stinky AI slop now. So, yeah, pour one out for Music Maker for Kids.
I tried FL Studio. It was not for me. The workflow didn't inspire me. I was too unlimited in FL Studio. I didn't have to do things in weird roundabout ways. Yawn. Too many possibilities. It does not invite experimentation. I tried Reaper but it was much of the same exact problem.
Then I found Caustic 3. An ambitious Android app! A DAW for your phone? Or later your tablet? Insane concept! FL Studio Mobile existed but it REALLY wasn't anything to write home about. It was just a small groovebox. Not a DAW. Not a real FL Studio. And how could it be, noone would make a DAW for a phone, right? Well Caustic 3 is, where it matters, fully featured. You don't have VST support but you have every effect and instrument you would need. You have only 6 tracks on each beatbox sampler. You only have 16 slots for instruments (advanced effects make an instrument take up even two or more slots). Yet you have a detailed waveform editor, the capability to sample the entire DAW into a pcm sample instrument, a soundfont player, a really good tempo/pitch shifting algorithm, and so so much more. There's an entire modular synth engine in there! And a vocoder!! You can go BUCKWILD with experimentation! The workflow is constrained to patterns, a little bit like the Switch game KORG Gadget, but with more ease of life features. You can record automation over any synth parameter, over patterns or over the whole song. You can have the songs BPM switch mid song. You can play Caustic 3 using a midi controller.
But getting Caustic 3 is a little bit tricky. It used to just be straight up on the Google Play store and on the Apple App Store. It used to cost a little bit of money; iirc about 4€. But! Now it is back, sort of! You can sideload it onto your Android device, which requires you to spit in the face of John Google. Or you can install the Windows version on your Windows device! For free!
So let me tell you, I LIVED using Caustic 3. The oldest song on my Youtube channel as well as the second last song on my Soundcloud profile were made with Caustic 3.
Caustic is really powerful. But also comfortably restrictive. Not limiting your creativity but forcing you to be intentional about chaos. Indulging in the experimentation. For me it is the perfect DAW.
But sometimes you need to work on the PC and there is no way around it. After all, some VSTs are really worth my attention. For quite some time, I used Reason (12). I bought a one time purchase license because subscriptions suck. Then I switched to Linux as a daily driver OS and switched to Bitwig as a DAW, also using a one time purchase. Both of these DAWs speak to me; they allow you to connect nodes together like a graph, in a kind of modular synthesis way. And they give me all the VST support I need. Speaking of which!
VSTs
Two VSTs stand out the most to me from the ones I've ever used. One is BlueArp, which is a really handy arpeggiator plug in. The cool thing is, the makers of BlueArp made a physical hardware device out of the VST. Unfortunately at 730/790 USD it is a bit too pricey for me to justify the purchase of right now. But it looks real cool and I had fun experiences with BlueArp back in the day! The other VST I wanna point out is Galdr. You have seen me post about it recently. It is free and very powerful. It is a supersaw with nasty built in distortion and a whole lot of modulation possibilities. The sound is clear and the plugin performs super well. I've recently used it to craft bass sounds akin to Muse's Time Is Running Out. Pretty sick ngl!
KORG Volca, Pocket Operators, Stylophones: Tools for the People
Let's talk about another entry in the list of super good cost value ratios: The KORG Volca series. I own a Volca Keys and a Volca Sample 2 and I aim to collect more. These are wonderful small synth boxes each with their own niche. I would argue the Keys is the most versatile one. It is paraphonic, and truly analog, with really high quality filters. The Sample 2 is, well, a sampler, with fun knobs to play around with. You can play around with the sample speed and cursor position and such in real time. It's good fun. I used it to make a Minecraft drum kit. Whimsical!
I also have a Stylophone, which has a similar form factor to the Volcas. You can get a Stylophone in every proper music instrument store. They are gimmicky af and let's be real they are kiiiinda trashy. But you can get some real cool sounds if you sample them into chords! Or if you throw their signal into a Kaoss Pad! Then you can make all kinds of spaceship sounds. Fun fun fun, and a Stylophone is EXTREMELY cheap. You will not notice a dent in your wallet.
Now I wanna take you into another cosmos of tiny cheap music gadgets that you can get; the Pocket Operators! They come in many forms and they are each very unique on their own. They do shine when you combine them with each other, enabling you to make dawless chiptune music powered by a few AAA batteries. A single pocket operator is not enough to make a full song, but two of them might do it! They cost between 50 and 100€. They are essentially tiny pcbs with a battery compartment and a simple unlit calculator screen. But damn if they aren't charming. I had the PO-20 Arcade, as some good friends have gifted me one for my birthday! Thanks folks!! It inspired me lots!
All of these things are to say, inspiration comes from weird things, and I love love love tiny weird whimsical musical gadgets.