Korg Kaossilator
Over winter break I decided to take on teh “music making” as another way to express/vent my creative energies(much like calling upon the power of Gray Skull but with less lightning). In all honesty, as my college friend John can attest, this is not my first foray into music. We started messing with digital music when CD turntables were cutting edge and Ableton Live 1.0 and Traktor were smoking hot. I never really got anywhere with that, and my free time became absorbed by other interests, nonetheless the desire to keep exploring music lingered.
It started with the nanoKey, an iPod Touch, then LSDJ, and now I get to top off my little menagerie with a Korg Kaossilator thanks to a good friend of mine. The Korg Kaossilator is quite different from Korgs line of Kaos pads which are devices for sampling audio and making loops. The Kaossilator is an instrument in itself, as it does not pull audio from any external sources, it generates it’s own synth, and allows you to play and manipulate that synth with it’s built-in touch pad. It has a headphone-out and a red and white RCA-out. The build is excellent, most of the photos online don’t do it justice. The silver material that wraps around the device is actually metal, and the plastic has a good, solid feel to it. As well, the unit is held together with nice little metal screws, which is a nice touch and adheres to Mr. Jalopy’s Owner’s Manifesto.
There are 100 instruments to choose from, 10 of which are actually preset drum sets which are quite good. 20 of those instruments are experimental sounds, many of which are 8-bit sounding, 1 even being a Pacman chomping sound. You can record loops and layer them, but it doesn’t save them on any memory card, so you wind up creating something new each time unless you’re recording your play using an external recorder(in my case a 15″ MBP). There are millions of combinations and settings to adjust and it’s all very intuitive. As usual I didn’t bother looking at the instructions and was making looped beats in minutes. It runs on 4 AA batteries, but allows you to connect an AC adapter which I had to buy separately(about $20). This thing is going to cause many a sleepless night as it is incredibly addicting. Here’s a sample of my first attempt:
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