KORG DS-10: A Wannabe's Odyssey

Editor's note: After making some basic tunes with KORG DS-10, Alex is interested in actually learning how to write music. Can anybody in the Bitmob community give him a hand? -Jason

I love electronic music. I toyed with the idea of going to school to be a sound engineer, not because I'm innately good at it but because I find it so interesting.

Naturally, when I saw the KORG DS-10 on The 1UP Show last year, my mind filled with lofty dreams of creating simple, elegant electronic masterpieces. The screenshots showing knob tweaking and note placing conjured up visions of studio headphones and head-nodding gestures that said, "Oh, yeah, right there. That's the perfect level of attack."

Alas, the news of the KORG DS-10 reminded me of a past failure: I had once tried to get into making music with the program FruityLoops. After hours of experimenting I was able to turn out 30 seconds of very generic-sounding techno using the program's most basic features.

I knew it would take a lot of tutorials before I could get any kind of results, so as any good twentysomething would do, I abandoned the program. This did give me some basic experience using sequencers, but I walked away feeling defeated.

But KORG DS-10 is a videogame! I know videogames; they are comfortable and familiar. This helped me muster up the courage to once again try my hand at electronic music. When my copy arrived in the mail, I quickly booted it up to poked around a bit in the interface.

To my horror, it was full of words and acronyms that I didn't understand, and the thin instruction manual was little help in deciphering the technical jargon. Although I had dreams of setting knobs to the perfect level of attack, in reality I didn't know what "attack" or any of the other knobs besides volume and pitch meant.

Thankfully, XSEED has a series of instructional videos on YouTube that actually explains what was going on. With some general knowledge under my belt, I set out to write a song. Real musicians (unlike me) probably have a musical idea or emotion that they want to express when they write a song. I pushed keys on the synth keyboard until I found a few notes that sounded OK together.

Then came the fun part: tweaking the sound of the synth until you get something nice that sounds like it came from a videogame. After experimenting with all of the knobs and waveforms, I started to get a feel for how to make certain kinds of sounds; this filled me with an immense sense of pride. There were other moments where I would exclaim to myself, "I think I made the sound from the Contra victory jingle," or "Wow, that sounds like the synth in a song by The Knife." I was absolutely giddy with delight after each of these moments.

But these victories were short lived when I came to the harsh realization that although I have the tools, no videogame could teach me how to write music. This was disheartening, but I was still having fun making sounds and simple beats.

For my first song I wanted to make something fuzzy sounding. I had been listening to a lot of Black Moth Super Rainbow at the time, and I was obsessed with their warm, fuzzy synths. I was able to kind of re-create the sound using the white noise waveform, but my song ended up sounding kind of creepy and less warm; it almost has a Dr. Octagon Blue Flowers vibe. It took me about 4 hours to get the song just right, but I was happy with the 90 seconds of sound that I had produced.

I then recorded it using Audacity and made an MP3. There's a special feeling that comes from seeing a song you made sitting in your iTunes library.

One of my favorite parts of making the songs was naming them. Since my first song sounded kind of sci-fi, I gave it the cheesiest sci-fi name I could dream up.

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W98AlMbDhQ0"

My second song was influenced by '80s synth pop. After listening to Yaz and New Order, I thought that I might be able to re-create something similar. After 6 hours or so, the song was ready. I gave it another joke name to reflect my creative process.

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC2y39oKmP4"

After making these two short songs, I tried desperately to make something new, but I couldn't get past two simple patterns and forge a whole song. This track is a good representation of my writer's block:

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t15nW2f8-Fc"

The creation process felt much more real than my experience with FruityLoops. With that program I just selected a bunch of premade sounds and placed them together in a sequencer. However, with the KORG DS-10, I created these sounds and tailored them to the song that I was working on.

I also gained a bigger vocabulary. The terms that I often use to describe music are vague and tenuous at best; if nothing else the KORG DS-10 taught me a more objective set of words to describe sounds.

I don't claim to be any kind of a master producer, but I can look back at how far I've come with a sense of pride. Maybe now the art-school dropouts down the street will let me hang out with them.

Does anyone have advice on how to actually write music?

Tags: Music, DS, KORG DS-10

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Mike Hawkins

July 17, 2009

"Dirge..." sounds like something you might hear while exploring in Metroid or Castlevania on NES. "Grasping at Straws" sounds like menu music in a cheesy 8-bit RPG. "Bitmob Club..." sounds like half of the song that would play on the title screen of a side scrolling shooter. Thats good shit, man. Makes me want to go get a DS so I can make some tunes. I never had Fruity Loops, but I did make some crappy techno/funk crap with Acid.

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Zachary Gilson

July 20, 2009

I've been getting into the same thing lately. I've really wanted to mix and create my own songs but I can't find the right software. Being a frugal cheap ass might not help. Did Korg-DS really give you the feeling of creating your own music?

Alex Long

@Zachary It really did; because there were so much to customize it felt like I made those synth sounds. Somebody with more skill than I could probably make these sounds easily and they may feel limited by the KORG DS-10 (it can't do many sounds at once and only one pattern can be played at a time) but for me it was perfect.

Jason Wilson

Alex -- Good luck at learning to write music. I hope someone in the Bitmob community can help.

Joe Harmon

Hi Alex, Sounds to me like you're writing music already. These compositions are very cool. The best way to start teaching yourself how to write music is to find an instrument, any instrument, on which to write. It can be a guitar, a piano, a trumpet, a violin...whatever you like. You don't need to master it, you just need to be able to play it enough to get basic song ideas across, to get them out of your head and into the real world where you can hear and adjust them. It seems you've found your instrument for that in the KORG DS-10, but if you begin to find it limiting, try a cheap keyboard/syth (if electronic music is the direction you want to go). It's a good idea to get some kind of recording equipment as well. This can be anything from a basic tape recorder to a MacBook laptop with Garadge Band or Logic installed...whatever fits your budget. This will allow you to record any song idea you may have rattling around in your head on the fly. When I'm at work or away from home and I get an idea I don't want to forget, I sometimes even hum it into my voicemail on my phone. The more you do this, the more you'll accumulate little pieces of songs that you can work with later, putting ideas together to form more complex music. There are plenty of books released every year from various people in and around the music industry teaching beginner songwriting and the like, and one of them may help as well. Just go to your local bookstore and look through their music section. If you have the time and money, or if you're in school already, take a Music Theory 101 class at a local community college. These classes are very basic, so it really doesn't matter what school you choose (so choose the cheapest one that best fits your schedule). Having a better understanding of the basic structure of music is something that you'll benefit from in 1000 little ways down the line without even really realizing it. Most of this stuff you're already doing on some level. & honestly, you seem to be doing fine, I really like the songs you've posted so far. Just keep working at it, because the more you get used to writing music, the more you start to get new ideas for songs, even when you're not focusing on it. It becomes a natural part of your day, and you'll start to catch yourself more and more often humming a melody or playing an idea in your head over and over. Keep at it Alex, Joe

Brett Bates

Hey, color me impressed! That's some good stuff, especially from a self-taught guy. I hope you keep at it.

July 21, 2009

Thanks for the advice Joe! I often have ideas but I never record them; I should start doing that. I think I was looking at writing music the wrong way: thinking of it as something more technical than it has to be (although I know that some training would be great, like you suggested).