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.”
Plasmatic shared COGG, a free audio effect that’s designed to “industrialize and metallize” your sound:
“COGG is a free effect (VST3/AU) that transforms your audio with a chain of metallic processing: granular pitch layering, harmonic distortion, and a convolution reverb built from synthetic metal plate impulse responses.
Simply turn up the Grind knob and watch the cog spin faster to begin metallizing your sound. Or, if you prefer more control over your sound, adjust the other knobs to perfect and fine tune the metallic mayhem!”
Version 1.1 adds 8 new presets for anyone to easily add metal and grit to their instruments.
COGG is available now as a free download for Mac + Windows. Just “download and destroy”!
Developer kota kato has released Puntone – a free, browser-based instrument called Puntone.
The core idea of Puntone is applying theremin-style continuous pitch glide not just to single notes, but to full chords. You can drag a chord voicing into another, and the whole chord slides as one continuous motion, rather than jump-cutting between shapes.
It’s designed primarily for touchscreens (iPad and similar tablets), with a dual-pad mode — one pad glides the root note, the other morphs the chord voicing. There’s also a simpler single-note mode with full-time portamento, playable from a PC keyboard too.
Puntone also includes built-in recording for layering takes.
Puntone is built on Web Audio API oscillators, with continuous frequency ramps (no samples/plugins), so there is no install and no account needed.
Puntone is available now as a free, browser-based instrument.
