a super quick exercise with the DSN-12 to see how easy/hard it is to write for 12 voices.  i've realized it's actually quite different from the DS-10 in quite a few important ways in terms of workflow, some good, some bad.  let me count the ways:

- there are just enough voices for a lead, varied percussion, and chords, which is just dandy.

- chords in particular are quite time-consuming and unintuitive to do unless you have a REALLY solid grasp of theory and punch in the notes at the first go. otherwise you'll be jumping back and forth between each monophonic voice just to experiment with chord parts.

- having 12 simultaneous voices instead of 6 is great, but the double-edged sword is in having to remember what all of those voices are actually used for from pattern to pattern.  this is where song complexity can really work exponentially against you.

- the DS-10 emulated 6 channels by using 4 of those channels for pre-generated sounds, played back as samples.  this actually had the side effect of making for some nice crunchy aliased sounds when pitched waaayy low, which is great for drums.  the DSN-12 on the other hand has no such limitation, which gives a hint to much more powerful the 3DS' cpu/audio is, but it's also too bad that i can't force and leverage the older sample-like behaviour. hopefully in a future release there'll be a switch to toggle that.

Tags: korg dsn12, week 50 2014, View by:bryface