Wave Gotik Treffen and the Hardware Roundabout

[BONES]

First of all, we have good news - NOVAkILL will be playing at Wave Gotik Treffen in Germany in June. It is 12 years since we last played overseas, at the same festival, so we are understandably excited, to the point that we've already done twice as much rehearsal as we've ever done before and it is still six weeks away. Feel free to come and throw stuff at us.

We've been rehearsing every week for the last three months and for most of that time the plan had been to use my Ultranova for everything. Thanks to it's built-in audio I/O and it's ability to mix in two external sound sources, Sik's drum pad output (stereo), it meant that my whole set-up was just a laptop, the Ultranova and a USB cable. It doesn't even need power - a two hour rehearsal uses just over 25% of the laptop's battery capacity, even though it is also powering the Ultranova.

However we ran into a limitation with mixing, in that it was very hard to get the Ultranova's levels right for every song, mostly because it doesn't have a simple volume control for it's internal synth output. So we decided to look around and I ended up with a Yamaha AG06, which is a small six channel mixer with USB I/O and built-in effects. When I bought a KORG Monologue last month, the mixer became even more useful.

Meanwhile, I had decided to put the Minilogue, JP-08 and JU-06 that I bought last year up on eBay, because I figured I'd never use any of them again. However, after I got the Minilogue out to take some photos for the listing, I plugged it in and had a play around with it for the first time in months. Because it's mono I could plug it into one of the mono channels of the new mixer, you only get effects on channels 1 and 2, and apply some reverb, compression and EQ to it, while the Monologue in the other channel gets the same reverb but it gets an Amp Sim instead of compression and EQ. The effects made a huge difference, to the point that I withdrew it from auction on eBay, even though it had been bid up to just $40 less than I paid for it, and we will now be taking it to Germany, not the Ultranova.

To be fair, a lot of the decision is around the Ultranova being way too big for carry-on luggage, while the Minilogue is the perfect size. But it also sounds great now, thanks to those simple effects (which you can program from the PC) and a few synth tips I learned from the simpler Monologue. It's one Achilles Heel, strings, we've taken care of by using it as a controller for something in Orion (Antidote, which was the early beta version of what became Dune, before Rich used that name for the Reason thing).

Of course, the Monologue is also coming; it fits in a 17" laptop sleeve which goes in my laptop bag, so our live set-up will feature two KORG analogue synths. If anyone had suggested that would be the case a year ago, I'd have laughed in their face. If anyone had told me at any time in the last 35 years that I'd be playing two synths with mini keys live on stage, I'd have been even more incredulous and amused. But I actually like the keys on the KORGs. I think it's because they are nice and long, so you don't have to scrunch your fingers up to play black and white keys together.

BTW, the JU-06 sold but the JP-08 is still available if anyone's interested. It comes with the k25m keyboard. Postage from Australia will be expensive, though.