So I grew up with a Yamaha PSR-38 keyboard, and although I took the thing less and less seriously over the years (though I always had mild fascination with the old Casiotones), I held onto it and more often than not included it for years in some drone improv sessions I used to put on (of all things, but it was never terribly out of place among the various improvised and toy instruments used in those sessions). Years later, I began messing around with MIDI in earnest for the first time in my life, and, since the thing had MIDI-in, I checked out its manual to see exactly what it was capable of.
The first thing I tried was to simply take advantage of its split bass section and its percussion section on the high end, and this was one of the ways I was getting to know the ORCA sequencing software, which was new to me at the time:
That eventually developed into a full track:
Now, that track used only one MIDI channel, but more recently I decided to try out its multi-channel capabilities and get a bit more creative with the voices themselves, this time using the MIDI capabilities of the NerdSEQ:
I know these old keyboards aren’t the most interesting pieces of hardware, with nothing but presets and nil for parameters manipulate on those presets, but I’ve become quite interested in just what one can squeeze out of these things with more modern methods of MIDI sequencing.
