Midicake Arp and The One Finger Jam (no talk)

video upload by Richard DeHove

"Something's wrong if you're making music but not having fun. It should all be fun. But writing good, coherent, interesting and long patterns is difficult (for me) and often liable not to be much fun. The usual path is to make a good 16-step pattern, copy it, add some variations, and bump to 32 steps. Then what about little fills and other bits? Now you're talking about "song mode" and other mathematical duties.

So the idea here was: Let's use the Arp to create long patterns, then hit record on the DB-01 and just feed in the result. I did try that and it worked a treat. But as an alternative you can just manually "play" the entire thing on the Arp - which is what I did here.

It took a bit of practice to get the timing right and I wouldn't want to be playing the entire "song" to a live audience with one finger unless there were a few other things running to cover in case of a mistake. Of course in the studio no one can hear you scream after five errors in a row.

Live-playing the DB-01s like this you lose various programmable goodness like the pitch envelopes, filter mod and accents; but on the flipside you can use portamento on the sequence (although I didn't here) and can use the Arp to set and vary the gate lengths. For example the top DB-01 is playing the high blippy theme on the Arp channel 3 and the longer three-note bass prod on channel 4. It can seemingly produce two sounds almost simultaneously because channel 3 has a short gate and high octave, while channel 4 has a long gate and low octave.

When you think about it that is pretty amazing work for an arpeggiator! It's like instant program change on a synth with no programs.

In this piece all the music is coming from the two DB-01s, with a drum track added afterwards in the DAW. I chopped it up a little to make a 90-second jam (instead of the 8-minute director's cut) but it is essentially live-played. There are no DAW effects, no extra layers or EQ.

After all this intricate fun it seems to me that calling the Midicake Arp an "arp" is monstrously understated. I see it more like your synths are big dumb blue-ribbon bovines standing around in a field and the Arp is a supercharged border collie begging to chase them through a Marine bootcamp obstacle course. Make those machines sweat! They cost enough.

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