Make Some Noise

So it's all well and good to have a synthesizer keyboard. The one I have is, in particular, a very tactile and immediate model, with all the controls directly at my fingertips to both shape the sound and play it melodically.

However, it is but one instrument, particularly since it's monotimbral (which is to say, it can only play (multiple) notes of one particular sound at any one time; you can't pick out two different sounds and play them both together). Most pieces of music these days are arranged for more than one instrument, so that leaves us in a bit of a quandary.

Thankfully, technology has an answer: sequencer synthesizers. In this case, in the form of a compact "groovebox".

This is the Roland Aira S-1, which is a monotimbral synthesizer with 4 note polyphony and a 64-step single-track sequencer. It has a relatively basic analog-modelled subtractive synth engine that has a square, sawtooth, sub-octave and noise oscillator which can be mixed together and filtered in various ways, plus a number of other features that I won't bother listing here.

What's important is that it's a melodic synthesizer, and it has a built-in sequencer so that I can program in a tune with a melody and/or chords, and it'll play it back in a loop hands-free so that I can play my keyboard while it does its thing.

So now I have two synthesizers, one of which plays itself, that I can set up to make two different melodic sounds. But melody is nothing without rhythm so let's go ahead and fix that.

This is the Roland Aira T-8, which is a drum and bass synthesizer. It can separately sequence 6 different drum sounds with some limited sound design options, along with a monophonic synthesized bass in either sawtooth or square wave form.

There's another part to this that I will discuss in a later post, but for now I've got a pretty decent setup going between these two grooveboxes.

And as a bonus, they're designed to daisy chain together quite nicely with 3.5mm TRS jacks, so they'll sync up the sequences between themselves via MIDI and also mix together the audio when you plug one into the other. Very convenient.