KORG KAMATA    

CONTEST 

                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intro

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So I won a music contest! I was happy with my entry, but winning these things is also down to the judge's musical taste, timing, current trends and of course a bit of luck. Here is a description of what happened.

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The brief

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In August 2016, Korg ran the 'Kamata contest', where participants had to write a track using a single Kamata instrument within the app Korg Gadget.

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The Kamata gadget produces video game sounds from the 80's. Here is the demo that came with the instrument launch:

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Kamata has two windows: the 'wavetable window'  where the user can manipulate a sound's waveshape by moving around white blocks and the 'parameter window' where typical controls such as envelope and LFO can be found along with reverb and delay FX.

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As with all Gadgets, at least 90% of parameters can be automated.

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My Entry

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I decided that I had two options:

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Option 1 - Create a full sounding track with beat, bass-line and lead by changing the sound every step. There were some great entries that did this. Here is one:

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It is a pretty ingenious way of creating the illusion that many tracks are playing at once when in fact only one is playing. The problem with this method is that a lot of your time is spent automating the parameters to ensure that the sound constantly changes. As a rule I love to automate but there is a limit! 

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(If you like this way of composing then I recommend looking into 'tracker' software. One that I have personal experience of using is SidTracker64 which is a great emulation of writing music on a Commodore 64.)

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Option 2 - Exploit the rule that allows an unrestricted amount of polyphony by writing a dense collection of notes. This is the route that I took and led to my entry "Into The Valley":

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I started with a very basic phrase to get me going (opening bars). Listening to this, I thought of Steve Reich - simple repeating fragments that imperceptibly shift slightly over time so that before you know it the rhythm, pitch and instrumentation are completely different. 

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I put on a couple of his tracks for ideas, taking particular inspiration from 'Electric Counterpoint':

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Listening to the same instrument being layered over and over again seemed an ideal way to proceed with my piece, given the rule constraints. I thus created a few different sections for variety and then finally automated a few parameters, in particular the waveshape, pitch envelope and of course the volume dynamics.

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Winning

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So fast forward to some Saturday in late September.... I actually found out that I'd won by another Gadget user who, having seen the results on Korg's Web-page (they must have been onto the announcement pretty quick since I was checking the same page every 10 minutes that morning!), congratulated me by email.

Soon after Korg sent me a generous selection of prizes.

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