Korg Volca Drum

The Korg Volca Drum expands the Volca series with a drum synthesizer that provides a wide range of possibilities for creating your own percussive sounds. In addition to a powerful DSP, there is a sophisticated sequencer with polyrhythms, a Slice function for adding fast breaks, and Choke for mutual damping of individual groups (e.g. open/closed hi-hats).

The drum kit can be composed of six "drums," each of which can have two layers. A total of 16 of these kits can fit in memory, and 10 kits are factory set.

Create your own sounds
Create sounds by selecting one of five waveforms (e.g., sine, saw, noise), three pitch modulators, and three envelope generators customized for drum sounds. The layered parameters can be set individually or simultaneously, and you can also layer the same sounds to achieve a properly thick tone.

Advanced effects
The sound of each drum is easily refined with bit reduction, wavefolding to get harmonic overhears or distortion with an overdrive effect. In this way, you achieve a wide sound palette whose colours can be used in many musical styles.

The effects section offers a waveguide resonator based on physical modelling that adds tuned resonances to the sound. In the case of the waveguide, or waveguide, there are two types to choose from - cylindrical, resembling a drum body or an elongated object, and stringed, adding a ringing character to the sound.

Sequencer with polyrhythms
The sixteen-step sequencer offers the ability to record in increments or in real time, chain patterns (up to 16) or record button movements to create sound variations.

The Active Step feature allows you to remove one step from a sequence to create polyrhythms (one for each sound), and live performance can also be enriched with the Jump feature, which takes you to a specific point in the sequence.

Use Slice to create fast breaks with the option to set the number of beats, and you can build up the sequence.

Live beats
To achieve live beats, just play around with the accents, which are available in sixteen levels. The Choke function then ensures that the individual parts are dampened should they play simultaneously. The most common use is for open/closed hi-hats, but there are no limits to creativity. There are also sophisticated random functions for random changes in sound, break, accent step, etc.

Controls are via knobs and a bright LCD display located on the aluminum panel.