Holy crap. We’re halfway through Novembeat already. If this is your first look at a blog post and you don’t know what I’m talking about, go back to day one. The short story is that Novembeat is a challenge (not a competition, but a personal one) to make one short jam a day for the month of November. It is fun, a pinch stressful, and a good way for me to mess around with some music gear that I don’t often go to.
Today it is the Digitakt and Korg Volca Drum. I’ve been playing a lot with the Digitakt this month and it really is a workhorse. It pairs well with something like the Volca Drum, which is powerful in sound design, but the sequencer is pretty limited (though impressive in its own ways). Often with the Volca Drum I go down rabbit holes with trying to do pitch shifts on the drums to make little melodies. It can be cool, but also…well, it’s a drum machine. So, I stuck to its strengths today and built a kit and sequenced it with the Digitakt. I added “fill” parts within the main beat for a little performance variation. I find that more satisfying than creating an entirely new pattern and switching between.
On the Digitakt, I laid out some percussion samples across trigs 1-5 and then “played” a part, tapping out rhythms until something sounded good to me. Finally, I added a couple synth parts, with the more ethereal part having low probability. This kept the groove a little more floaty and gave it some variation.
I enjoyed this one, hope you do too!
