Arps and acid with Midicake ARP, Arturia Minifreak, TT-303, Dreadbox Erebus, Roland TR-06, Meris LVX

video upload by Jay Hosking

"A live, semi-improvised synthesizer jam performed entirely on hardware.

Important note: Midicake sent me over the ARP for free. I rarely get free gear, though I'm very grateful when it happens. There was no expectation for me to put it in a video, and no request from Midicake other than to share my thoughts with them. That said, I really enjoyed using it and I'll be keeping it around, as it strikes a nice balance between the "plug-and-pretty" of the NDLR and the "depth and detail" of a traditional sequencer. I've still got plenty to explore with it. Thanks, Chris!

I started with the ARP, because I wanted to see what it could do. I didn't want to overload the table at first, so I took out the Minifreak, which has voices to spare. Very quickly I was creating arpeggios and sequencing lines I really liked, and easily able to customize the lines to what I was looking for, from rhythms to polymetrics to inversions etc. I started with just standard major and minor chords, but it was extremely easy to customize the chords on the eight chord buttons once I wanted some 7ths and 6ths. And to have a chord sequencer built in was extremely helpful, as it reduced the amount of gear I needed on the table.

Once I had the bones of the song structure, I filled out some more parts, with Erebus on bass and the TR-06 on drums. Finally, I felt it needed something a little gnarlier around the interlude, and luckily I'd just picked up the awesome 303 clone from Cyclone Analogic. Once that was in place, it was just a matter of shaping the song through performance parameters. The final result is pretty cool, and adds some tones, timbres, and textures I haven't been getting as much these days.

Thanks for listening.

Midicake ARP - most sequencing (i.e. for Minifreak and Erebus)
Arturia Minifreak - three synth lines
Dreadbox Erebus - bass synth
Cyclone Analogic Bass Bot TT-303 - acid bass (using its own sequence)
Meris LVX - drive and delay for TT-303
Kenton MIDI Thru - MIDI splitter/thru box"