RS052 Korg Monotribe: Dirty Grandpa

For literally thousands of years, humanity only had a very limited set of tools when it came to creating music, yet they managed to do well with it and created endless variations through clever use of the tools they had.

Today, one can easily have all the world’s sounds instantly accessible on their laptops. Thanks to the proliferation of cheap synths, you can also stuff your studio with lots of keys, knobs and blinky lights for the cost of a single vintage synth.

Once you sit on that pile of hard and or software, I bet you will spend more time browsing through countless presets or trying to understand what all these knobs actually do than with actual music making. Too much sometimes isn’t too good either.

This is, where machines like the Korg Monotribe can really help you to focus. In many respects, it is stripped down to the absolute minimum - no midi, no patch memory, no 500 different snares to choose from. Sure, this is mainly down to the fact that Korg cut a lot of corners to pretty much kickstart the market segment of super affordable synth/groovebox, but at the same time something magical happened because with all its simplicity, you can find yourself focusing and finding creative ways to make the little box sing in no time. The dirty grandpa of all the volcas can still stand it’s ground against all these fancy hipster kids.

When the Monotribe was your age, it only had three drum sounds and a single VCO – and that’s all it had when it walked five miles barefoot to school and back in winter through five feet of snow, and it walked uphill – both ways ;)



If you like the background animations in my videos, go check out my new sub channel Rejected Synths Recycling Center, where you can download them for use in your own video projects:

   / @rsrecycling  

Credit where it’s due, all the cloud and storm footage I used in the jam segment can be found here

   • Storm Stock Footage | Free HD Video -...  

Tracklist:

0:00 Intro
0:28 Introduction
2:25 Drum Sounds Demo
3:12 Drum Roll Demo
3:55 Controls and Connectivity
5:16 Synth Voice Demo
7:36 Demo Jam
11:20 Conclusion
11:49 Outro