As they did with the monotron synthesizer, Korg has quietly released schematics for its the analog drum synthesis portion of its monotribe synth and step-sequencing rhythm machine. You just see the bits that make the drum sounds, but that’s the interesting and modifiable part.

In order to grab the download, you’ll need to fill out a form with your name and address, saying you acknowledge you’re voiding the warranty and that you won’t turn around and sue Korg. That address doesn’t get used for anything, though, so long as you uncheck the “newsletter” box. Once you do, you get a high-res PDF (low-res image above) with the schematics, marked public. (Liability I know is an important issue. You never know; you might swallow the drum circuits and then sue Korg for feeling ill afterwards. Or something. Ask a lawyer.)

As for the design itself, it’s a notably simple design by Hiroaki Nishijima, an elegantly-minimal set of analog circuits for producing sound. As such, it should be ripe for modification. In fact, the first thing I’d be inclined to do is, rather than void a monotribe’s warranty, simply breadboard this circuit, which would make for exceedingly easy variations on the same basic layout. You might even wind up with something else. (One nice touch in the design: look at how the noise source is cleverly – and necessarily – linked to hat and snare sounds.)

Mods have also worked with MIDI – a port is hidden on the board – but apparently with sometimes-disappointing timing results. More promising is the thought of new drum sounds, and even some breadboarded drum circuits outside the monotribe itself.

And that’s what I think is admirable about Korg’s approach: in the earlier days of sound and music electronics, publishing these kinds of schematics was the norm. As opposed to today’s litigious age, it was more or less assumed that straightforward ideas would be copied and modified. Korg hasn’t said they’re encouraging that kind of behavior, but by releasing the schematics, they at least acknowledge that they’re unafraid of that potential scenario. The point is, you wouldn’t come up with a cloned monotribe – you’d simply learn something about analog drum synthesis, then move on to something that’d be quite different. Korg remains the company with the wherewithal to produce the thing en masse, anyway. It’s not open source hardware, mind, so there’s a gray area as far as your ability to use the circuit, but that shouldn’t stop you from wiring this up and learning from it.

Ultimately, my guess is we’ll hear some new drum sounds out of this, and that’s exciting.

Find the schematics at:
http://www.korg.com/monotribeschematics

More on modifying monotribe:

An extensive, extensive post on MIDI modifications – how to do it, physically and electronically, as well as some of the limitations (which in turn partly explain why this didn’t ship with MIDI):
Monotribe, MIDI and me [Game Boy musician nitro2k01's blog]

Video from above:

And one post on drum mods (I expect there are others, if you wish to share in comments):
MONOTRIBE drum mod and peek inside

In the interest of fairness, Chris Randall posted what I thought was a thought-provoking review of the monotribe. Keeping in mind Chris was apparently a great fan of the simpler, cheaper, smaller monotron synth – and produced an album with it / see link at bottom – his review of the monotribe and its bare-bones analog drums was pretty brutal.

See his original thoughts:
Monotribe Mini-Review…

…followed by some criticism of the monotribe in, oddly enough, an iOS-themed story:
iGear…

Chris isn’t one to mince words or be especially diplomatic, but it’s worth reading what he has to say. He also predicts I’ll like … something just like this story. But it’s worth considering all sides of this little box. And despite what Chris says about my own perspective, I still believe for real modification, open source hardware is best – not that all hardware need be open source, but rather that for hardware you want people to modify, the open source license is a useful tool. I also think that it’s okay to just use gear and not always modify it; playing instruments is great, too, speaking even personally. That said, I still think Korg releasing schematics is a big deal, and I’m enjoying getting inside this particular design. And for the record, Chris still put some monotribe sounds into his music.

See also:
Electronic Sounds and Satisfying Limits: Chris Randall Talks About Making Capacitor, Resistor EPs

It’s simply stunning some of the terrific instrument and effect plug-ins available that are now free and open source – yes, free as in freedom, not just freeware. I had commented in the past something along the lines of, “boy, wouldn’t it be great if this now meant, say, a Linux port?” and then went on the business of my daily life, which tends not to include re-compiling plug-ins. But now, the folks of JUCETICE have been busy doing just that, serving up delicious instrument and effect goodness, running native on Linux.

Translation: fire up that netbook and make some music.

Following up on our tutorial on Ardour and netbook-optimized music competition with Renoise and Indamixx, here’s what you need to get rolling.

With Linux growing in popularity on netbooks – and an option like the pre-configured Indamixx solution saving you the work of optimizing and configuring it – it’s suddenly no longer a stretch to imagine yourself a Linux music user. Of course, what you don’t want is to wind up without the arsenal of plug-ins to which we’ve all become accustomed. There are various ways of hosting Windows VSTs under Linux as though they were native plug-ins; check out dssi-vst (which also enables 32-bit VSTs from Windows under 64-bit Linux hosts), in conjunction with WINE. That should probably be the subject of a separate tutorial. (Ardour 3 also promises Windows VST support.)

But here, let’s have a look at native Linux plug-ins. JUCETICE has some beautiful creations of their own – an elegant, 32-voice polyphonic drum synthesizer and a TB-303 clone – plus some familiar favorites ported from Windows, like the ingenious DiscoDSP sampler created by the late, great Arguru.

Here, we’ll use the native Linux version of a commercial host, energyXT. energyXT is proprietary, but it costs just EUR59, has a free demo to check out before you purchase, and – if you do like it – is really different than any of its competitors.

Patrick Shirkey of 64studio, the music-centric Linux distro, walks us through the steps necessary to get the JUCETICE plug-ins going under energyXT on Linux – all native, no WINE or Windows anywhere.

I’ll be doing this myself on my Indamixx test unit, and will let you know how that goes.

Developer note: yes, you should definitely check out the JUCE framework, which makes developing cross-platform C++ easy, efficient, and modern, and is free for open-source projects.

Patrick explains:

1. Download the jucetice linuxvst plugin : http://www.anticore.org/jucetice/?page_id=7

2. Make a folder called “plugins” in the home directory

3. Save or move the plugins to that folder and extract the plugins.

4. Open energyXT and add the “plugins” folder to the “Plugins” folder list. Choose File > Setup:

Select the “Browser” tab and set it to the “Plugins” section.

Now select the “plugins” folder and add it to the list of known folders.

[Here’s what it looks like in the path structure.]

5. To add the plugin to a project double click on the “Plugins” section on the left panel of the main window to show all the plugins and right click on the plugin you want to use. Click “Add as Send” from the popup menu.

6. Finally, open the “Window” menu and choose the plugin from the list to display the user interface and adjust the settings.

Ed.: Definitely let us know if this is helpful to you; we’ll have some more comprehensive, big-picture tutorials on this stuff soon – but in the meantime, I’m definitely checking out these instruments!