I want to buy the volca drum to play with and had an idea.

When I play guitar I like doing small loops to improv.

My looper is super simple and does not have midi sync or anything like that so letting the volca play while trying to match tempo with my loops is practically impossible.

I was thinking of buying a P10 stereo > P2 mono adapter and just plug my guitar cable into the volca headphones out and to my pedalboard and just record the drum pattern into the looper. This should work, right?

My amp is solid state super clean so it will not color the sound too much.

For my latest release, I used Zoom L-6 to connect all my Volcas and integrate with Ableton Live (using "Ext. Instrument"). It was so fun and so much faster than using VSTs, since I know the Volcas inside out from hours of DAWless jamming and can quickly find the sounds I need.

I used the stock Xylo and String presets, pitched them down (from Am to Fm, appropriately) and applied compression, filter and delay.

Do you have any tips for using the Volcas as sound modules? Do you know how I can get an "Ext. Instrument" in Ableton to play a recorded MIDI sequence (I played everything live in the recording)?

Actually two questions in one here:
I know many questions have been asked on Reddit about Volca PPQN, and that the pulse rate out can be changed.
However, I can find no instructions on precisely how this is done.
Further, being a bit on the autistic side of life, I either see patterns really fast, or can't see them at all. And in the case of PPQN, I'm finding all the info a bit confusing on exactly what rates (higher or lower) will not send the DFAM into hyper-speed. For at the moment when I link my buddy's Volca Drum to my DFAM, the DFAM runs ultra fast and therefore becomes useless for whole sessions as running so fast is so limiting and gets boring really quickly.

Once I've done it once, I'll be fine, but for now it's really doing my head in and holding me back. And my buddy with the Volca Drum gets brain-fry when I try to address it with him.
For eg, even when I do learn how to access PPQN rate change, will 1 pulse per step give me a normal regular step-rate/BPM? Or will higher values do this? I know I'm gonna kick myself when I get an answer to this one)
Any online advice I do find only tells me that I can set PPQN rate out, but absolutely none tell me HOW to though.

The manual doesn't appear to really be very helpful at all in this respect. (Although, once I learn this trick, something I've already read in the manual will jump out at me, too late. :-D )

To recap:

1. How do I set PPQN rate for outputting from Volca Drum?
2. Will I need lower or higher rate per step (or 2 steps?) to make other devices (DFAM in this case) go at a NORMAL speed instead of it racing at the speed of light?

New volca drum firmware???
Fx??
Fill sections??
Stepped (not smoothed) motion control??
The goddammned ability to check what the value of a parameter is before having it moved to whatever position the knob is at????

Come on!!

Three cheers for u/hj-oja!!

I’m excited to get jamming tomorrow

Possibly been asked a million times, but is there a relatively simple way to connect the Modular to something like a Novation Launchkey (which has a 3.5mm TRS midi) or via a USB hub? Everything I saw on YouTube involved modding the Volca or using another device as well.

Not interested in purchasing anything more than a cable or similar.

I’ve been looking at buying one, but want to make sure I can use a midi controller for live shows.

Hi! Quick update on the custom firmware for the volca drum. Still chipping away at it, not ready to ship yet, but I figured I'd share what's already working so far.

What's done so far

• Reverted the FUNC + SWING and FUNC + TEMPO behavior to the defaults. Shoutout to u/zeknife for pointing out that changing this didn't make much sense. I completely agreed, so I rolled them back to how they originally worked.
• QPI keeps the harmonic relationship between layers. With Layer 1/2 and quantize (QPI) on, nudging PITCH used to destroy the harmonic relationship between them. Now, that relationship is preserved.
• GLD: motion glide is now optional. New entry in Global Settings. Turn it off and your recorded motion snaps from step to step instead of gliding into the next value — for anyone who always wanted their motion sequences stepped rather than smoothed.

And a couple more things...

I'm adding a new sound-shaping option per part that I'm not ready to fully detail yet — let's just say the palette of tones you can get out of a part is a lot wider than before.

There's also another feature in the works that I'm keeping under wraps for now. If you think about the volca fm, you might be able to guess what it is. It's something a lot of people have been quietly hoping for since the volca drum first came out.

More on both once they're actually working end to end.

No ETA yet, still testing on hardware between changes. Will post again once it's ready.

Also, a huge thank you to everyone for all the kind words!
I'm just a broke university student and don't own many other synths, so modding other gear isn't really something I can tackle right now...

(btw, can't really say much out loud about this, but if you check my GitHub profile you might find something that'd make my day.)

How is this guy getting this acid filter/resonance sound out of the sample? In one of the comments someone mentions sampling a "filter squelch" that he then controls with the "start' knob. I'm not exactly sure what that means though. Has anyone here done this before?

Read that Reaper is a essentially free program and Vosyr is decent for Korg Volcas. This has been fun to experiment with what I have (Volca Kick, Volca Bass and Volca Beats).

Any opions and suggestions is greatly appreciated.

Hi ! Any drummer here using volca keys to create one person show with ? Live drumming + loop created during the show ?