Korg announce Volca Kick analogue kick generator
New to the Korg Volca series of mini marvels is a box designed to let you sculpt the perfect kick. Volca Kick is an analogue kick generator that can create sounds from a powerful kick drum all the way to a kick bass. Just as long as it has kick in it.
Korg Volca Kick
The sound generation engine is based upon the Korg MS-20 filter which, when pushed into maximum resonance, self-oscillates into some fabulous kick and bass sounds. There’s not masses of control going on but enough to tweak yourself a unique sounding kick. The MS-20 Resonator section features Pitch, Bend and Time which deals with the sense of pitch coming from the “body resonance” of the kick. The Pulse Colour and Level control the clip components and the Amp Attack and Delay shape the envelope. Finally the Drive and Tone controls push it through a multi-stage distortion to give it a bit of edge.
Sequencing
No Volca would be complete without a sequencer and the 16 steps in the Volca Kick let you bang out your perfect kick or bass line. You can record in real-time if you wish including any parameter changes. The memory can store 16 patterns and the pattern chain function lets you chain together entire songs.
Performing
For performance Korg offers a number of little tools. Active Step lets you skip steps in a sequence to create unexpected rhythms. Accent, Slide and Bend Reverse do what you imagine they would. But new for this Volca is a function called Touch FX which lets you trigger an effect on the sequence in real-time. This enables lots of performance control with cuts, breaks and rolls.
Connect
As with the other Volcas the Volca Kick features a simple sync port and a MIDI IN connection so you can integrate with other Volcas, bits of hardware or your DAW. It runs on batteries and has an inbuilt speaker making it super portable.
Most kick generators are based on waveforms and so Korg have done something really interesting with the Volca Kick. The melodic character of that MS-20 filter really gives this box an uncommon scope for kick bass and sub bass generation. With this and the release of the Arp Odyssey desktop synth Korg are really hitting their stride.
The Korg Volca Kick will be available in October for $159.
More information available on the Korg website.
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