How to have swing on the Volca FM

When I brought the Volca FM, I complained about it not having a swing function (either by a dedicated knob or a combination such as FUNC+TEMPO). If you happen to own a Volca Sample or a Volca Kick, however, there is a neat trick you can use, albeit at the expense of loosing the capability to sync these newer volcas to your old ones.

Well, recently I’ve been preparing a comeback to the Korg Volca Sample Tutorial Series, and learned that the Volca Sample can switch between two sync modes: the traditional volca sync (one pulse every two steps, or 2PPQ) and a newer one pulse per step of the sequencer (4PPQ). This latter mode is capable of carrying swing to other synced units.




Now, to have swing over sync, you do need both machines to be in 4PPQ mode, and this is done by accessing the Global Menu and setting option 8 to ON. Unfortunately, this option is only available on the newer volcas (FM, Sample and Kick), which means that by using it, you’ll loose the ability to sync the newer volcas properly to the older ones.

Hopefully, Korg will someday get around to do a firmware upgrade, so that we can have swing over sync on all volcas.

New Tutorial Series Released Today!

Just a quick update. I just uploaded the first episode of a 7 (or 8) episode tutorial series devoted to the Korg SQ-1. I’ve been having a few requests to do such a thing, and I finally managed to get the time and courage to do it. The tutorials will be added to this playlist on my YouTube Channel. I hope you enjoy this new series, find it inspiring and start applying the tips and tricks in it to make new music.

Please feel free to put you questions in the comments for the video. I’ll try to reply to them either via reply, or on a future episode, or even on a Q&A episode at the end of the series.

New video: Volca TNT 8

I just placed a new video on YouTube. This is the first “production” video filmed with the Logitech c920 and also with the new text templates. Still a new technology for me: this was actually the second take, as the first one was completely destroyed by a problem with the H.264 codec. In order to fix it, I had to set the camera output to MJPG and the output codec to MJPG – Compressed.

This video is about a little trick I learned in the Facebook Community “Korg Volca Range”: How to have LFO sync with the Volca Bass. I hope you like it. :)




Control Voltage for the Monotribe – Part 1: Making an Adapter Cable

I always used MIDI. I am very familiar to MIDI: from the communication between Pure Data and my software synths, to my PCR-500, when using the Volcas or the Microkorg… So I never understood all the fuzz about Control Voltage (CV)… for me it looked like a relique from ancient times. I even brought the DinTribe adapter to hookup my Monotribe to my other synths and controllers.




When the 2.1 firmware update for the Monotribe was release, it added CV-Gate input connectivity. Since now I am the proud owner of a MicroBrute and a SQ-1, I decided to give it a go. This is how I made the cable adapter for the Monotribe, how I calibrated it and also some ideas I had during my experimentation. This text is accompanied by YouTube videos showing the steps I took. Continue reading “Control Voltage for the Monotribe – Part 1: Making an Adapter Cable”