Blog 3

Since we are on the topic of techno and house, I thought I would talk about some of the instrumentation that is used in those styles.

The first one is simply a drum machine with a built in sequencer. On a previous post I showed a similar drum pad, but that was simply a midi controller. This drum machine has all the sound built into it. You can assign sounds to each pad and then play them as demonstrated in the video below. You can even upload your own sounds into the drum machine so that you can access them. These are the essentially what the DJs in the 80's used to make beats for house music.



After watching the Kraftwerk video for Robots I started looking into vocoders and talk boxes. I also realized I didn't really know the difference between the two. A talk box is generally used for a guitar an involves a tube that is placed on your mouth. When you play a note of the guitar you can create vocal sound with the pitch that was played on the guitar. Here is a good example of this. Although he is not makes words, he is changing the tonality of the pitch with his mouth. (There is a tube connected to the microphone)




Talk boxes can also be used with synthesizer. This is a microkorg which is an awesome synth for the price.



A vocoder uses a microphone in order to make the given sounds as seen in Kraftwerk's video of The Robots This could be played in real time where you speak into the microphone and the words are the pitch you play on the keyboard. Another way to do this is to record a given sound as a sample. When you play the keyboard, the sample is then played back at the pitch of the given key, as seen in the video below.