I think the Volcas have always fit well into a niche that’s neither “toy” nor “professional audio gear”. I’ve been to lots of gigs where people have a table top full of Volcas, fx pedals, circuit-bent stuff, DIY noisemakers, Pocket Operators, Monotrons and the like, and they fit in well. No-one really cares about noise levels, perfect sync, long sequences etc: they just want to have fun experimenting with weird sounds and improvised music.

I bust out my Volca Keys every now and again when I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of other synths. Its limits are sometimes liberating.

I love my Volca Keys! Obviously not the most versatile synthesizer, but so compact and portable. Load it with batteries, throw it in a backpack with headphones, and take it anywhere for a solo jam. So much fun!

Bad Gear Friday!!!! This series has so many gems. The jams, the genre naming, and most of all a great host! Have a great weekend Audiopilz!

this is one of the only youtube shows, i sit down and watch actively. thanks man, i love the work and detail you put in each episode!

"Best and worst Volca at the same time" This describes every Volca

In my opinion, the Volca keys is frustratingly limited... but on the other hand, it has a gorgeous soud ! Nice episode, thanls !

This series is amazing. Is super entertaining. It's the most fun I've had with any synth reviews on youtube. Keep it up!!

some of the most fun Ive ever had is just syncing the Keys, Beats and Bass together and having a jam. Maybe the end product isnt going to get pressed on vinyl or anything, but that isnt always a bad thing

Ooh I always look forward to these. Thanks for uploading so regularly

One of your best episodes yet. I have a ton of vintage synths and I still find that I have fun and get a great sound out of my Volca Bass. It’s the fun factor I keep coming back to. Keep up the great work. It’s why I look forward to Fridays!

after months and months of being a subscriber, I still have to pause the videos to read the dank memes. always the best

Love how much effort you put into these videos 🙂

korg really do deserve more credit than they get. People always go on about how Behringer made synthesizer more accable but Korg was the ones who really made synths and especially analog synths available to the mass markets! still love my korg volca fm and korg monotribe (possible bad gear contender, love that bad boy but it's quite disliked i think hah)

Excellent Show. The second jam you did with the Digitakt gimped up in the midi set up was pure fire my friend. I was cutin' a few shapes. Blessings from Berlin.

this actually nearly made me buy one. great stuff. your jams always make me switch my gear on

The trio of Volca Keys, Bass and Beats are what got me into making music with hardware again, many fond memories. Found my Keys in the back of cupboard just the other day, so perhaps it's time to dust it off and see what it can still do. That unison is far fatter than I remember it sounding

Every time you release a new video I just can't help but click. You have a power to make the unholiest of creations sound like the most blessed creations known to mankind. I wonder what gets made into gold next time!

Glad seeing you using the Blofeld and Digitakt more often since you reviewed em ;) lovely stuff, as usual. Thanks for bringing some extra happines to the end of the week :)

There's something about the Volcas that's appealing, but then you start thinking about it and unless you absolutely are missing a sound one of them makes, then all you can think about is, 'Why would I want to make a track with a bunch of volcas in the first place?' which leads you to the answer, Neo. The answer is...you like gimmicky hardware. So I resisted all temptations, though I really did want the FM Volca cause I'm an FM junkie. I still don't have any actual analog gear, but then again, I don't feel like I'm that much of an audio purist in the first place to warrant putting money on one. What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, Korg is still cool, though.

That Loki/Lowkey thumbnail visual pun may be the best KZfaq thumbnail ever!...

Thank you so much for giving the Korg Volca keys the Bad Gear treatment! I have one for sale at the moment, so this episode should give this little guy a nice value bump!

I really love your vids, man. truly, I do. thanks for, both, the fine work you're doing & the good laughs too. bravo!!

Thanks for the video, always good vibes. Much love!

My favorite series on KZfaq!

This was my first learning synth and I enjoyed every minute of it - I'd recommend it to beginners in a heartbeat. It's limited, but full of warm classic sounds that can fit in lots of styles. This thing is a huge success for it's price and the design choices they made with such tight limitations. Now where's the Volca Keys 2, since they Sample got to fix some of its flaws? Maybe some LFO options and more waveforms?

Great episode, like always. Totally didn't expect it. Thanks :D

Your video editing skills are on point. The Volca Keys was my first analog synth. It was fun to learn some things on. Then I moved to the Monologue. Love your vids.

Another masterpiece. I know we all love the memes but those demo jams were really tight!

My god that genre description was just getting more & more hilarious & then you ended it with "uniting drunk people around the globe" I lost it 🤣🤣🤣 Great episode - I love my keys but I did get it 2nd hand & cheap, so as a dirty little accessible noisebox, it's great.

Jesus so much work goes into this videos

Man, what a work of art. Each time better!

Good to see so much love for the Keys. It’s hard not to forgive the little rascal for its foibles. Ultimately, it has some lovely sounds, and you can always find a place for it in a track, if only in a supporting role

It always takes me about 30 minutes to watch these as I have to pause each of the awesome flash memes to take it all in. Love the few towards the end.. there's far too much modular wankery going round nowadays.

Yo posted and for rest of the day I hear your songs in my head.🎹

One of the few channels where I like before watching!. I appreciate alot your content, thank you very plenty

Audiopils, You never fail to inspire me to dust off my own old gear. Time for a Volca Keys sound design session it is!

I will say this. I love Korg. They make so many quality, affordable tools and instruments. My synth journey started with the Korg Gadget 2, and has continued with microKEY and other Korg soft synths. I don't know where it will go from here but I'm very thankful for them. Maybe do the Gadget 2 on a video. I suspect that there are a lot of people who put it down, but for an absolute beginner, it was a decent starting point.

Bro your closing jam genre descriptions are too on point.

I love this content! Cheers from Hungary!

You CAN use it as a step sequencer but it takes extra steps. For my peeps in the comments I'll explain. Assuming you've selected a sequence and have cleared it, first hold FUNC and press ACTIVE STEP. Remove all steps except the first one. Press the record button once and then press the note you want. Press the play button to make it stop repeating. Then press FUNC, ACTIVE STEP and select the next step in the sequence and remove the previous. Repeat until you have a sequence. Disclaimer time: if you make a mistake, you have to start ALL over again. You can't erase single steps so make sure you've made sure you know what note/chord you want. If you try to record over a previous step, some weird compression happens which I need to experiment with and see if I can get some strange sounds out of that limitation. But it is frustrating when you just want to redo the previous step.

Apart from the great sound, the simplicity makes the Keys a great choice for live shows/improvisations. I just know the sweet spots, I can move among them easily, and it is predictable and reliable. Kind of like the Moog Siri, but 10x cheaper. Anyway, great episode, one of your snappiest and funniest ones.

Nice video. I have a Keys, actually it was my first synth. It has its quirks and limitations, but meanwhile, I absolutely love it for its spacey sounds. Essential part of my setup. :)

Top notch as always! Meme-heavy so had to rewind a million times and try to pause to see/read them memes. I just wonder if Volca or Roland has the most memes out there in the wild. xD

One of the things that turned me on was the feeling of so much power in such a little package that ran on AA batteries. Forget the speaker. I listened with headphones but I could take this thing ANYWHERE! By the way, no mention should be made of Volcas without paying tribute to that coolest of geniuses Tats Takahashi (creator also of the Minilogue) who’s now heading up Korg Berlin.

For the money, this is a great synthesizer with great sound. I will soon be using it for live as a bass synthesizer, during rehearsals it does not make noise at all It is also the most beautiful synthesizer in the series.

Always entertaining! Have a great weekend!

I had one - we used it a lot in minimal techno with fast attack and release, to make short "clicke-ty"-percussion sounds whilst playing with the sequencer. Superb for this purpose.

3:49 This is pure speculation on my part, but Korg probably used the same ring mod circuit that they used in the MS-20 - a XOR logic gate with a comparator on each input to turn the sawtooth into a square wave. It's a super cheap way of getting a ring mod type sound and it's incredibly easy to implement. They could have introduced a square wave without the ring mod quite easily by tapping the signal before it enters the logic chip.

The korg volca keys. One of the best synthesizers ever made. A future classic to match the tb303. Yes I really mean it.

been waiting for this all along

I've waited all week and another one is out! 😀

Very brave of you to tempt Uli like that, once he's done with Roland and Moog he's gonna go after Korg haha

I totally love mine.. it sounds good on extra high and extra low notes

That was a fantastic episode!!

Thnx for putting Pluto in your planet list 😀. I'm a big fan of Pluto for more then 30 years) And I have a lot of the similar titles in my bookshelves(mostly in Russian). Have a nice day!

Starting out I had a Volca binge. I still have four.. I sold the Sample as it just felt too limited to do much beyond… play samples. I was going to sell a couple more but they’re so easy to get nice sound out of. The whole unit is a sweet spot! I swore off them, but sequencing them from an Elektron piece of gear, they’re so much fun. I’m tempted to get an FM.. and this makes me wants a Keys!

"the detuned unison tones would certainly be fun in genres like DnB" *Doesnt make DnB for the third jam* My disappointment is immeasurable

this is the best thing i ever saw and I am signing up for your Patreon right now

Such a beautiful tone and a lovely filter.

Besides just 2 PPQ (2 steps per pulse), all the original Volcas (Bass, Beats. Keys) have since been updated to also support 4 PPQ (1 step per pulse), via Global setting #8. Flux mode allows you to record up to 8 "1/8 sub-steps" per actual step, which combined with 1/4 tempo allows for up to 128 steps per pattern.

08:00 Is it due to the 'orifices' topic that you put the Volca on URANUS?

Extremely funny this week. I need that. Thanks

Ozzylators. That made me spit my whisky on my laptop screen. Worth it though, brilliant! Jams awesome as usual, great stuff my good sir!

Best part of day Many good

I am confused still though how has your channel not got a million billion subs yet. Always fun & witty as hell Always educational Rammed with details that make you either go buy or rediscover your own kit 👌🏼 Bravo Sir (Also I may have just purchased a Wolca Keys🤣🤠🎹)

I wore out my pause button checking out all of the memes. Nice jams as well. (drink responsibly)

VolcaKeys is by far the cheapest unison-capable analog 'polysynth' ever made - the Poly-800 is a CS-80 in comparison😁 so I cut it some considerable slack

Ah yes, finally! I have waited long for this episode. :-) I told you it was bad when you did some other Volca and asked if it was the worst. Nope, they Keys is the worst.

Man these are the most entertaining reviews ever,,,great work sir,,,,,lol love the fact that some of bad gear is some of my favourite gear namely the tb3 nether the less you're editing is spot on 👏

Those beats you created were great. Loved it.

Orange County DAW Choppers. "Look, you can't make a synth polyphonic by Marc Dotying, I mean Automatically Gainsaying that it is, when it isn't!" Just making sure I meet my quota for meme-appreciation comments each week. Florian, I owe you a beer when I finally get to meet you. You are the only channel that wears out my frame-by-frame keys while watching KZfaq. Holy cow this one was packed. 🙏🏻

I think these are great for people who are very limited with space and budget, or people who are absolutely clueless about synth and other similar gear. If you really wanna dig in on a budget, take a full hit, and get yourself a used microkorg. Still probably the most professional “budget” synth, that keeps up with most “pro-level” gear.

I’m here for the Wolcas. You didn’t disappoint.

Another great demo there.

Bad gear? Volca keys is a masterpiece!

Me hearing you say "Harsh Noise" is like dogs hearing their owner say "walk" on the phone. I'm excited and confused, and mostly just praying you will do it again.

More capable than I thought! Very nice!

Great play as always!

The Keys can store 128 presets and have additional, any-shape LFOs. It's all about combining the motion sequence and the active step functions. 128 Presets: Think of a preset as a photography of the state of your knobs. Load an empty sequence. Create your lovely sound. Activate motion sequence, and one single step of your 16 steps sequence. That will be the photography of your preset. Push Rec and move every knob just a bit so its position gets registered. Don't record notes. Save. To access the preset later on, just go back to that single step and press play. 16 steps x 8 sequences = 128 presests. You can freely play it with the device keyboard itself or a nice, big MIDI controller. One LFO per Knob: Think of an LFO as a tiny robot repeatedly moving a knob for you. Instead of an actual LFO, that could be the motion sequencer. The result is the same. Load an empty sequence. Create your lovely sound. Activate motion sequence. Record knob movements according to how you would modulate them with an LFO. You don't need to record notes but you can put something just to hear what's happening and erase it once you're done. If you want to do LFO shapes that require a lot of speed or abrupt changes, you can take advantage of either lowering the tempo or editing step by step with the Active Step funtion as in the previous operation. For the rest of the knobs, the ones you want to remain still, record moving them just a tiny bit so their position gets recorded, and allow the bar to end so their stillness is also recorded. To access the preset later on, just go back to that sequence and press play. 8 sequences = 8 presets but with complex LFOs. Save. You can freely play it with the device keyboard itself or a nice, big MIDI controller. Interesting stuff: You can use these LFOs to modulate the actual LFO, by moving the Rate, Pitch and Cutoff Ints!

1st.

the blofeld combo was really nice, very complimentary up front vs spaced out arrangement.

I love my keys ! it's in all my live setups since the begining (using external sequencer of course) You did a really nice video on it, and congrats for finding the 18khz noise at 4:17 XD it's on my unit to, I think it's in all units lol !

Wow, the memes are coming fast and dense on this one! Love the drunk animals jam at the end this time.

I must admit that I was worried to see you retread old ground when I saw that you were dealing with another « wolca », but as usual this is justified and so well done I can’t complain! Amazing work, and for once that’s not a synth that will change prices thanks to you featuring it! I’m renewing my plea for you to take swig at the OP-1!

holy crap, an animals are beautiful people reference? nice :3 great video!

And here I was yesterday thinking it'd be so cool to see a bad gear for a Volca :D

I love my Volca Keys. And I also instantly loved your jams and recognized that special tone. Its that lofi saw with the sloppy detune and the 70s filter, which is similar to the CAT. In analog territory, it complements my Rev2 beautifully! And of course its a ridiculously lot bang for the buck!

nice use of the fun memes and some great jams as usual I haven't used my Volca Synth as much as some of the others ( I have the whole set, and not in my ass) but I always appreciated the sound and what it could do for the money in a small portable unit :-)

I gotta chime in on this one as this is one of my all time favorite synths. You're absolutely right that the tone is unmistakably Korg! That is why this thing is extremely iconic. As you mentioned about this thing's much older brother the Univox k1 and k2, the character comes from just how quirky this thing is. Those synths until not very long ago were going for pennies because they were too quirky to be usable. Now people understand that their unique filters and oscillators are AWESOME. The same line of thought goes on here, and I have to give credit to Korg with ALL of the Volcas. They're not trying to make a budget synth that does it all(they already did that with the Microkorg). They're trying to make something weird, and to me this is the best example. Tons of features under the hood that don't operate as they should, just like the Univoxs Korg started with.

I just got one of these a couple of months ago, and I love it. I'm actually using it in a performance tomorrow night as part of my live rig. I guess it comes down to whether or not the sound fits the music you're making.

Finally, you covered a synth I own. I love the Keys dusty sound. Also you should bring back the RX15 more!

Thinking about getting one at some point to control with my digitone. Another great episode sir

Great, honest review as always, oh and funny too. I had this a couple of years ago, enjoyed it but let it go because of the noise and how easy it was to lose that sweet spot when jamming. I still miss it a bit though.

Your editing is so god damn dense, good vid and neat gear!

Superb episode, bro. Plus…now I really want the non-existent Volca Key Star RK 100S 🎹💫

Love the "animals are beautiful people" video samples.

Geil! Immer wieder herrlich! Beste Grüsse aus Zagreb nach Wien!

You have the perfect voice for narration

Well, with this one you finally did it, all the synths i have are featured on your show ^^ I actually use it quite a lot in combination with my pyramid for sequencing. Almost never as a lead, but always useful for detailing. And like you suggest, i can do wonders as a unison bass in DnB! You know, stuff i'm not going to buy another synth for if this little guy can handle it. Thanks, and keep pointing out to us it's us, the complainers who're bad, not the gear ;)