The Volca Bass has a MIDI in port as well as a sync in port. Although the quality of its inbuilt keyboard is fine for programming slide and active steps it’s not that useful for inputting notes. With that in mind it’s most likely I’ll use an external keyboard for sequencing notes. The question that springs to mind immediately is whether it’s feasible or useful to do all the sequencing in a DAW and treating the unit simply as a tone generator. To that end I’ll have a look at how it handles MIDI input.
Looking at the Korg Volca Bass MIDI implementation chart we can quickly see that there are three parameters which do not appear on the front panel of the unit :5 | Slide time11 | Expression49 | Gate Time
We can also see that VCF Peak and Cutoff are not MIDI-assignable. The following controllers are available and seem to work OK. Note that octave control only affects notes which are played from the unit’s built-in keyboard – i.e. it does not affect notes stored in the unit’s sequencer or which are sent by MIDI.
40 | Octave
41 | LFO Rate
42 | LFO Int
43 | VCO 1 Pitch
44 | VCO 2 Pitch
45 | VCO 3 Pitch
46 | EG Attack
47 | EG Decay / Release
48 | Cutoff EG Int
Most notably however, is that there is no way of sending notes to the different VCOs via MIDI. That deserves a more detailed description so I’ll describe the behaviour of the in-built sequencer first.
Firstly, check here if you need a quick refresher on what a VCO is and why we care.
VCO grouping is configured by using ‘func’+ one of M1, M2, M3. Respectively this will configure one of the following groupings:
* Each VCO on a different track
* VCO1+VCO2, VCO3 on a different track
* All VCOs on the same track
Bear in mind that it’s a monosynth so only one note at a time will be sent to the output – but by having the VCOs on different tracks then we can sequence notes, active steps and slides separately. This also opens the door for polyrhythms, so for example VCO1 could be playing a sequence of 16 steps, VCO2 could be playing a sequence of 12 steps, and VCO3 playing a sequence of 3 steps. We can also mute each as required and alter the pitch – note that I also don’t see a way of muting individual VCOs via MIDI.
Since having 3 independent VCOs is one of the key reasons I got the Volca Bass, the constraints in the MIDI implementation limit the usefulness of controlling the unit via MIDI sequencing. At this point in time it seems that from the perspective of recording it will most likely be a case of recording either long progressions (with filter sweeps and live sequence adjustments) or smaller loops and post-processing/sequencing them in the DAW.
It appears that when using the internal sequencer the ‘sync in’ port needs to be used to receive the time code from the DAW. After pressing the play button, the unit will wait for time signals to trigger the internal sequencer.