Bach Gets ‘Switched On’ Using The Korg Electribe ER-1 Drum Machine
Reader Hank Mason shared this arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major (BWV 846) on the Korg Electribe ER-1 drum machine.
Mason notes, “The ER-1 glitches out a bit here, which happens sometimes in extreme weather (NYC was in the middle of a heat wave when I recorded this). I like to think that the strange tunings that arise might be recognizable to someone from Bach’s time.”
Technical details:
Korg Electribe ER-1 Rhythm Synthesizer
Krakauer Bros. Grand Piano
Mason notes:
“In my experiments with the ER-1, I always thought that its 4 VCOs would lend themselves well to rendering a fugue, and in a brief moment of joblessness I composed one (plus an accompanying prelude later on). The difficulty in having the ER-1 play it is that, being a drum machine, it was never intended to play pitched tones in any conventional way. Each VCO is fixed to a single MIDI note, and pitch can only be modulated via its 0-127 pitch parameter.
In order to realize any kind of score on the ER-1, I needed to painstakingly map frequencies (corresponding to 12TET pitches) to combinations of the ER-1’s ‘pitch’, ‘modulation speed’, and ‘modulation depth’ parameters. With that mapping in place, I wrote a python script that can parse .musicxml files and translate them to the ER-1.
The resulting pitches are never squarely “correct” in 12TET, an effect that I like given the tuning practices in place at the time when Bach was writing the Well-Tempered Clavier.”
