A friend and coworker of mine, Chris Mennie, was kind enough to lend me his new toy, the Korg Kaossilator. It’s a nifty little synth and digital loop recorder with a rather unique interface. It has an X-Y touch sensitive pad, along with a twisty knob and a couple of poorly positioned buttons and even more poorly positioned audio jacks. With a grand total of three 7-segment led displays, operating the gizmo takes the equivalent skill of laproscopic surgery. The good news, is that Korg’s synth sounds are really good, and they provide a good selection of trance, house, and techno sounds that are useful when exercising its sound-on-sound loop recorder.

The task was to see what I could do with it. I liked the portability of it. I plugged my headphones into it and sat on the couch, in bed, on the porch, basically anywhere I could zone out and get swept away by the odd acid arpegiators, techno choruses, vox, and drum’n'bass perc kits. It quickly became evident that 8 beats of loop wasn’t going to be enough to produce something with any structure. So I took the thing downstairs to get it plugged in to the music studio.

I worked out a basic style and structure and recorded several tracks, some safe, some really experimental. Then I did the very bold thing of returning the instrument back to its owner! With no opportunity to re-record, I was left with the big task of mixing, augmenting and otherwise massaging what I had into something worthy of signing my name to.

I found it particularly challenging to avoid really thick mixes with too many sounds. After all, the idea was to show off the Kaossilator, so it was tempting to use every sound regardless of how crazy it was. I used minimal song structure to allow me to focus on the character of the sounds, using just enough to call it a song.

I padded it out with just a couple of sounds from the Roland XP-80 to fill in the gaps and mask out some performance bloopers. The Kaossilator has no MIDI input, so everything was recorded live and unquantized. I imposed the same restrictions on the XP-80 to keep the same feel. It does have a slightly sloppy feel in places, but there were limited options. The most positive thing I can say about the experience is that I really like the easy access to the expression axis, it makes me think I should make more use of it in my future recordings. …that and I enjoy hearing new synth sounds!

It took a couple of weeks to get enough spare time to chip away at the sounds, and mix it all together into something I was happy with. But I have finally come up with a demo track. So here’s what I came up with.

This file is available for download:

Kaos.mp3 (4 MB, 2 min 7 sec)

Special thanks to Chris Mennie for the loan of the gear.