Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
volca fm is a 6-operator 3-voice FM synthesizer that's completely DX7 compatible.
This means that it can load your DX7 patches via MIDI SYS-EX.
It has 32 program memories and for the 16 sequences
that it can store you can assign a patch of your liking.
This means that if you edit both the sound and the sequence
you will need to save the patch and the sequence.
So a thing or two about FM synthesis
It's very flexible but also very complicated to program.
There are 23 parameters for each of the six operators plus 16 more.
So you have 154 parameters for each program patch.
Now you can go into edit mode and access all of these parameters on the volca itself.
We've included a parameter list to help you out with this if you're so inclined.
But if you're not, we have boiled down the interface
into these super easy edit knobs on the panel.
And we do this by separating the operators into carriers and modulators.
I'll start by explaining the carrier operators
And these are ones at the end of the signal chain.
So you hear the outputs directly from the audio out.
If you change the envelope of these carrier operators,
it will affect the sound just like with the Amp EG on a subtractive synth.
Now the envelope generators inside the FM engine is actually quite complicated.
It has 8 parameters each.
So, what you do when you're moving a ***
is these movements are being mapped to multiple parameters
and this is the key of making the FM engine so easy to edit.
Now, the modulators are the operators that come before the carriers
and these work by modulating the frequencies of the operators that come after them
and this adds spectral complexity to the sound.
Now, each of these operators also have their own envelope generators
and they can be edited using the modulator attack and decay knobs.
So for this sound I can slow down the attack
and you'll hear that the onsets of the spectral spread is delayed.
The volca fm ships with 32 program patches designed by KORG.
But if you want to load your own, you can use MIDI as mentioned before
and the SYS-EX files can come from multitude of online sources
from compatible software
or from a real DX7 connected to the MIDI input of your volca fm.
Now, there's also a way to transfer data from one volca to another using the sync connection
and you do this by simply going into Edit - Export
and you get five options - Current Program, All Programs, Current Sequence,
All Sequences, or you can go all the way
and entirely clone the whole contents of one volca fm into another.
So now that we have a great sounding patch inside your of volca fm,
it's time to make a great sounding sequence
and we've added some features on the volca fm that really help you out with that which I'd like to show you.
We have transpose on a fader here
which will shift the notes either by octave or chromatically.
We also have velocity on a fader.
And we've also got a very powerful arpeggiator that can go as fast as a 12th step.
That's a 192 speed.
And of course, you can motion sequence all of the fader and *** movements
to make your sequence really exciting.
We’ve also added a few more sequence functions that are new to the volca series
such as Warp Active Step.
This changes the speed of the sequence so that the actual length in time
for a cycle of the sequence remains the same
regardless of the number of active steps you have.
So, I have a 16-step sequence here and a 6-step sequence on this volca.
And now with the memory load we can choose multiple sequences
to play one after the other.
Simply hold the button down
and you can choose a stretch of multiple patterns.
I’m just going to choose two here so you can see two 16-step sequences
playing one after the other.
So get creative and have fun.