Korg Forums

Me: total newbie with strong interest in electronic music, largely inspired by Atom tm/Senor Coconut. Some musical knowledge from playing clarinet and trumpet for many years. Fairly good ear, comfortable with computers and electronics.

So, I bought a KP3 effects pad and the KO Pro this spring and have been having a blast with them. Have been creating my own loops and beats and also sampling and warping (and re-warping) my favorite recordings. But the more I explore the KP3, the more I see that many of its effects are so powerful that in order to work well, they require much fine-tuning - gentle, precise tweaking to extract and create just the right sounds. And this level of tweaking, I imagine, must be a severe challenge during a live performance. The performer must keep the beat going or else lose his/her groove and, in turn, the audience. But some of these effects, or so it seems to me, require lots of experimentation - aka precise adjustment of the finger on pad - before they produce anything useful. It's not simply a matter of casually sweeping one's finger across the pad and praying for something groovy to emerge.
So, I am starting to explore the possibilities of using the KP3 offline, by which I mean, for example, taking a particular loop and working on it and recording the tweaked version and doing this again and again, using different effects, until I have a stock pile of closely-related tracks, or clips (not sure of the right jargon is, here) that I can then splice and layer together in a recording program (DAW).
Does this make sense? Granted, I am a novice, and there may be people who've mastered live KP3 manipulation in ways that I cannot imagine. And I know it's possible to set up pre-defined banks of effects, ready to throw into the mix, and perhaps even matched to pre-selected recordings. But I wonder if anyone else has tried to use the machine this way - as a powerful effects processor that can yield great precision results at one's leisure, ready for later recombination. I assume there'll be some issues with aligning the beats between these disparate tracks. And perhaps other issues I've not thought of?
I'm curious to hear others' ideas and experiences along these lines. I know that there may be better ways of doing what i am proposing - with fancier, more MIDI-ish gear - but for now, I'd like to pursue this line of Kaoss-only thought.

heh if you think precision on the KP3 is tough, wait til you play around with a KOPro. it's essentially unusable for accurate synthing, aside from playing octaves.

i wholeheartedly disagree...it is very easy to be accurate with the kpro owith a little practice....it has a GRID printed on it...if you can't find your way around a grid, then i don't know what could make it any easier for you!

I have had no problem with precision on the KOPro. On KP3, my experience is that certain effects are very ticklish and there's seemingly no quick way, especially in the heat of live performance, to find the right settings with one's finger. I am specifically thinking of the reverb effects (RVB.1-6) and looper effects (LoP1 - 13) and the sampling effects (SMP1 - 7). Each of these, or so it seems to me, require some experimentation and exploration to find out what they'll do to a particular sound or loop. They are each v. powerful, if used properly and accurately, but I cannot see how any mortal can stay on top of them - can keep them from producing noise, that is - on the fly. Sure, some people may like the noise and glitched out sound they can produce; I have no problem with that. But it seems to me one could make the most of them in a studio setting. I will try and see what I can make happen. But again, I am curious is anyone else here is doing something like this. Or do I have it all wrong, and KP3 is only, or mainly, for live manipulation? Seems to me KP3 could provide the best of both worlds - a great live gizmo (at least using a great number but perhaps not all of its effects) AND a highly intuitive and powerful effects box for creating new layers and clips for use in a studio-mix setting. As I say, synching these layers may be an issue, but perhaps it's possible to just align them visually and sonically in a DAW.

One simple option is to find your best, most precise XY point for the effect you're tweaking then save it to a program button with HOLD on.
Then, when you hit the button - everything with be already set and activated along with the effect-depth knob setting.
I'll often use this for a ring-modular setting or reverb. You can then mess with it and come back to the original setting.

I'm doing a lot of sending the KOPro through a Mini-KP effects pad into the Korg SoS, undoing as needed until I record a sound I like.

I think you could then take those "perfect" .wav files and reload them as samples or load them into your computer, etc...