Arturia MicroFreak, Korg NTS-1, Bounce Jam

Published on Mar 27, 2020 Waveformer

"The Arturia MicroFreak takes the Korg NTS-1 for a stroll, with the brilliant Wave oscillator and beautiful Submarine reverb of the NTS-1.

My music on Bandcamp: http://waveformer42.bandcamp.com/

The patch for the MicroFreak is included below.

I use the MicroFreak arpeggiator with maximum spice and frequent dice. The NTS-1 arpeggiator is set to random and switched from off to on to hold during the jam.

During the jam, I play with filter cutoff and resonance, cyclic envelope fall time and mod amount, envelope decay and filter amunt on the MicroFreak. On the NTS-1, I play with filter cutoff, oscillator shape and bit crush.

The MicroFreak always transmits MIDI velocity, and I find it a bit hard to precisely control this using the MicroFreak keyboard. The NTS-1 receives velocity and it modulates the oscillator amplitude directly, from 0 to max. In this jam, those (almost) random variations in oscillator amplitude work pretty well, as I'm using the MicroFreak arpeggiator. But I tried playing a solo on the MicroFreak while it was connected to the NTS-1, and I found it very hard to play with consistent velocity.

Also, when I turn on the arpeggiator on the NTS-1, big changes in velocity makes the oscillator make a clicking noise. I wish Korg would fix this in a firmware update for the NTS-1. That kind of clicking isn't very musical.

Other than that, it was really fun to use the two synths together. The effect section on the NTS-1 is really excellent, and fits the MicroFreak very well. Also having the MicroFreak control the NTS-1 over MIDI makes me feel like the NTS-1 is a second oscillator for the MicroFreak.

There's no way to share NTS-1 patches yet, so here's as much of the patch that I can remember. Oscillator type Wave, Wave b 17, Bit crush 40. Filter type LP2, Cutoff 50%, Resonance 0%, Rate 9Hz, Depth 25%. Env type ADSR, Release 75%. Modulator off. Arpeggiator type random, Octave, Tempo 69 BPM, Pattern length 3.

The MicroFreak patch is named "BounceWF", and can be downloaded from the files section of the Arturia MicroFreak facebook group.

The audio is recorded on a Korg KP2S and normalized in Audacity. Video is recorded on iPhoneX. Audio and video is synchronized in DaVinci Resolve 15.

Gear:
- Arturia MicroFreak
- Korg NTS-1
- Korg Mini Kaoss Pad 2S (for recording)

Connections:
- Microfreak - NTS-1
- NTS-1 - KP2S (for recording)
- Midi from MicroFreak to NTS-1

Misc:
- Tempo: 69 BPM
- Chords: Cmaj7+6 (C0 G0 E1 B1 A1 C2) - Dm7+4 (D0 A0 F1 C1 G1 A1) - Fmaj7+6 (F1 C1 E1 F1 A1 D1) - G7+6 (G0 D1 E1 F1 G1 B1) - Gm7 (G0 D1 F1 Bb1 G1)"