Berlin School Experiment #10

It is frustrating that we have to program the JV1080 from a small dot-matrix display. The synthesis engine on this one is so great, it is easy to get lost while programming in it, but I guess that the JV1080 is a synth of its time, and at the time presets and preset-packs were all the rage, so manufacturers wouldn’t bother with the sound editing capabilities. Fortunately those days are gone (are they?).

In this piece I use a custom patch on the JV-1018, loosely related to the Flying Waltz preset, but with an extensive use of the ring modulators. This pad sound serves as a base for the whole track, as it plays a descending chord sequence. The microbrute plays the sequencer and receives the same MIDI notes as the JV-1080. Thus, the sequence is transposed for the last incoming note at all time. My PSC500 controller is also sending MIDI clock to the Volca Beats, which plays a part latter on in the piece… in line with my previous experiment of incorporating percussion in Berlin School-inspired Music.




This track was recorded in one take, with the Volca and the MicroBrute being recorded onto two mono-tracks using the Focusrite 2i2 and the JV-1080 being recorded onto a stereo track using the Behringer UCA-202. Ardour was used for all the recording and mixing, which involved using the alsa_in program to incorporate the Behringer’s inputs into the list of available inputs… I tried to avoid using compressors in this track, and replaced most of them by saturators. This technique should keep the transients, despite introducing some distortion. As usual, Calf plugins were expensively used to mix and master this piece, and the final video was assembled in KdenLive, running on a linux box.