I’ve been trying to see how many different sounds I can get out of this synthesizer and it’s amazing how versatile it is. It seems like many sounds that I hear made for this synth lean toward being ‘electronic’ sounding. And although I like those sounds too… I’ve been trying to find out how good the AK is at emulating acoustic instruments.
I’m pleased with how great it is at emulating brass, string, and drum sounds. Here are a few presets I made and put together for a quick cover of ‘Arthur’s Theme’ by Christopher Cross.
seriously. this dude. he’s the real A4/AK hero. I love cuckoo and the cabinet of curiosities guy, but this dude is proving a point. I gave him my money, and I believe in him. he’s a church.
Pretty cool acoustic mimic sounds, nice job This and a bunch of the stuff on your site is just midi sequencer song files right? Or have you programmed everything yourself? Not knocking it either way, just I get the mega quantized ‘midi track’ vibe on a lot of it. The ‘country’ genre vibe one on your site especially
First off - I’m not much of a keyboard player by any stretch ha ha … so don’t give me any credit for that! All credit goes to the genius artists who wrote the music I’m using and who I greatly admire.
What I can do well is sound design. It’s all about the sounds for me.
I threw together the demo songs in Ableton with midi tracks. Although not all of them, some I played myself, and others I programmed in the midi notes. I wasn’t concerned with showcasing the music as much as giving a familiar sometimes funny context to the sounds I made. As a way to show how versatile the Analog Keys/Four is across such a wide range of diverse music. And I’m sure with the talent here at Elektronauts you will come up with original work that will greatly surpass my demo examples.
I’m a huge fan of all the Elektron products and I especially like the Analog Keys/Four. In making sounds for this synthesizer I am constantly amazed at how diverse it can sound for an analog synth. I really love how it can make string and brass sounds. It’s not that it sounds like those instruments per se, but to me it’s so much more. For example one of my favorite synths was the Emulator II. It used samples but it was low bit rate and had analog filters so sounds like ‘Mercato Strings’ sounded wonderful not because they were sample accurate but warm. And that’s what’s so great about the AK/A4 it can do approximations of these acoustic sounds and they just come out so warm and full of character.
When I started making sounds for this synth I approached it completely empty and devoid of presets. And my goal was to make it sound ‘beautiful’, at least to my standard of sonic beauty anyway. I love sound and I love beautiful sounds, and so I lean towards acoustic sounds being beautiful to my ears. And I was happy how well this synth does at this task. To sum it up: It sounds good! And I think anyone with time to program it can make it sound beautiful.
This and a bunch of the stuff on your site is just midi sequencer song files right? Or have you programmed everything yourself? Not knocking it either way, just I get the mega quantized ‘midi track’ vibe on a lot of it. The ‘country’ genre vibe one on your site especially 