The kit I have in the lab is all geared toward performance, i.e. loads of knobs but not necessarily highly specced when it comes to MIDI control. Working through the MIDI implementation charts it really highlights how good the old QY70 was with the ability to control it.
Before this new influx of Volcas, my main pieces of kit were the Drumbrute, Minibrute (using an SQ-1 as a step sequencer), and MPC touch. I hadn’t really gone into the MPC in great detail as I was focused on knob twiddling. This was excellent fun and really good for jumping into a good jamming buzz.
Although it was a deliberate decision to avoid recording anything (as I didn’t want to get bogged down in the technical side of things) the time has come for me to bite the bullet and figure out how all the parts hang together. Having taken a week off work it’s an ideal window to push through all the mind-burning idiosyncrasies of getting everything working.
There is something of a philosophical decision to be made, and I’m not sure whether it is something that can be done at a high level, or whether I need my workflow to be flexible for different approaches. A broad question I ask myself is: Do I want to set things up for recording, or jamming?
The decision in fact may not need to be made at all, although I suspect that limitations of the hardware and the connectivity between devices will force me to choose between approaches, and as I become more familiar with everything I can review and modify the configuration.
I suspect that my workflow will include sampling down the output from the volcas in order to give me a songbuilding framework, and then going back to the volcas as a performance instrument and recording the transitions and sweeps over the scope of the whole track. With a limited amount of sequence memory it may be prudent to create MIDI sequences in the DAW and then record them onto the Volcas. This means that each track will have a bunch of components saved as MIDI parts, which just leaves sound sculpting and sequence augmentation (i.e. device specific changes to improve the sequence).
Time will tell though, and the first part will be figuring out which tools these units are going to give me to work with.