Ambient jam: Volca Bass + Ventris + Keystep + nanoKONTROL2 (2018-10-14)

Published on Oct 15, 2018 Slenterende Beer

"I've bought the Source Audio Ventris, an effects pedal that features two reverb / delay engines that can be combined, either in parallel or serial mode. This gear experiment is a deep dive into the features of the Ventris, in combination with the Volca Bass. Headphones recommended!

The basics of this setup are pretty simple: I program some slow arpeggios on the Keystep, which is played by the Volca Bass. The Bass has a slow and intense LFO on the cut-off, which produces the volume swells. The output of the Bass is then sent to the Ventris, and that's where the interesting stuff starts.

The Ventris has two effect engines running in serial mode. The first effect is called "offspring" and that's the cascading, modulated delay at the start of the video. This sound is then fed into the "shimmer" effect, which I introduce by increasing the "control 1" and "time" knob. The "time" knob also increases the delay feedback of the 'offspring' effect.

Each reverb / delay engine on the Ventris has its own set of parameters, but only part of them can be controlled from the pedal's interface. It becomes more restricted when using both reverb engines at the same time, because two of the knobs are then dedicated to controlling the dry/wet mix of the two engines. Live control of the other parameters, and for both engines at the same time, can be done using MIDI CC messages. I've configured the nanoKONTROL so that the first 4 sliders and knobs control parameters of effect A, and the second 4 control parameters of effect B. For example, the fifth knob controls the amount of shimmer of effect B, which is a parameter I tweak quite a lot in this video.

One hardware problem I had to solve: the nanoKONTROL only has a USB MIDI connector, but the Ventris requires a 5-pin MIDI plug. I don't currently own a hardware USB MIDI host (I'm considering the Retrokits RK-005), so I used my MacBook to achieve the MIDI routing. The nanoKONTROL is connected to my laptop, and so is the iConnectivity mio, which is in turn connected to the Ventris. By default MacOS does not support MIDI routing from one device to another, so I used the open source "MIDIrouter" app to achieve this (see link below).

The reason I decided to try the Ventris is because I'd like to see if it can replace my GFI System Specular Reverb V2. I love the sound of my Specular, but it only really does one sound (beautiful lush ambient epicness) and misses features that I'd like (e.g. 100% wet, control over pre-delay and modulation, MIDI clock sync for delay timings). I'm happy to say I can create a sound with the Ventris that is just as lush as the Specular, but with a lot more control and whole lot more extra features due to the possibility to use two reverb engines. (You can even use the Ventris' stereo inputs to feed it two different instruments, give them each their own reverb engine, and then configure it so that it is 'summed' into stereo again!) I feel like there's a lot more to discover with this device, even more so since you can download patches other people have created using its Neuro app.

Korg Volca Bass
Source Audio Ventris
Korg nanoKONTROL2
Arturia Keystep
iConnectivity mio

MIDIrouter: https://github.com/icaroferre/MIDIRouter

Video recorded with iPhone 7. Audio recorded with UFX1204 in "standalone" mode, recording directly to USB HDD.

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