 Hello, Oslo, it's Sink here. This is the new Korg Vulk Rfm, an updated and upgraded version of the old Vulk of Favourite. Korg actually sent this to me a little while ago primarily to check whether my free online browser-based editor for the Vulk Rfm, Synth Marta, has still worked with this new version. And it's just as well, they did send it over because it didn't. That's all fixed now. But I thought seeing as I had the new Vulk Rfm in my possession, I thought I would do a quick video to discuss what has been changed and upgraded, both on the Vulk Rfm but also in my edit section I've made some upgrades there as well and sort of reintroduce people to the editor while we were here. I won't go into a huge amount of depth in terms of sound design and the like. I've covered the original Vulk Rfm in a lot of detail on this channel and none of those facets of the instrument have really changed. But as I say, Korg have improved and added features to this version which I will just quickly go over in this video. So probably the biggest thing that Korg have added in terms of this being a synth that you can perform with is that we have moved from three note polyphony on the original up to six notes on the new Vulk Rfm. The three note polyphony was possibly not the hugest deal if you were sequencing but if you were trying to play the Vulk R with a keyboard just use it as a sound module. Three notes could often be a little bit restrictive so it's great to see that's been expanded. From that perspective of actually playing it as a sound module from a keyboard, on the original Vulk Rfm the velocity was linked to the slider on the front panel which was just CC numbers which meant that the original Vulk Rfm didn't respond to velocity if you played it with a keyboard and that was a bummer frankly. That is no longer the case. So first things first, if you plug a MIDI keyboard into the Vulk Rfm it will now respond to velocity. The velocity slider now runs from positive to negative and it's an offset to the velocity. When you place stuff into the sequencer by default it's at velocity 63, 4 I think which is the middle velocity and you can move that velocity up and down now rather than from zero to full and this will offset the incoming velocity. The transpose slider works as it always did and that was always a really useful performance tool so I'm glad to see that that is still as it was. So on the original Vulk Rfm we had our chorus which was a good way of adding some stereo width. We now have also got a reverb and you can have both on at once so I'll just turn off the chorus for a second. That's the dry sound turning on the reverb. So it's actually a really nice sounding reverb not too bright, not too clouded in the mids and it to my ears seems to nicely compliment actually the sort of harder digital sounds that you might end up with in FM so that's a really nice improvement because I would often pair the original Vulk Rfm with a reverb pedal because it sounded better if you did so having that reverb in here and a stereo reverb no less is actually a huge benefit and as I say, you can have both on at once chorus and reverb, cool. So the next thing to mention is that the patch memory has been doubled used to have 32 slots, you now have 64 and in the first 32 out of the box we've got a new set of factory patches which I have to say pretty good certainly I think better than the original factory patches the original factory patches are actually here as well if you miss them, if you go up to the past 32 you'll get to your original factory patches if you want to revisit them one other small thing from a sound design perspective actually is that on the original Vulk Rfm the sample and hold LFO didn't work properly and it just made glitchy noises it now works as it should do so if you're importing DX7 patches with sample and hold LFOs in they actually sound like they're meant to now so just a couple of things left related directly to MIDI actually so the first thing is if you are eagle-eyed you will notice that the full-size 5-pin-din MIDI input is now gone so we are now working with the Minijack MIDI connections but we have now got a MIDI in and out so the MIDI out transmits all of the knobs and sliders it transmits clock obviously it transmits note-on messages which are affected by the velocity slider it doesn't oddly transmit the arpeggiator which is a shame so if you turn on the arpeggiator and play a chord you just send the chord which is a shame that you can't send the arp there but perhaps that will be changed in an upcoming firmware so just a note on these Minijack connections if you have kit which uses these Minijack connections then great but the adapter to go to a full-sized DIN connector doesn't come in the box so you will need to get one of these or two of these if you want to connect to gear which needs full-size connections so Korg equipment uses type A converters so make sure that you grab type A converters if you have multiple devices which all use type A you can just connect them with a Minijack so for example the SQ64 for example the sequencer that Korg make that has Minijack outputs it's the same type you can just use a Minijack TRS connection between them but if you wanted to go between for example this and a Beatstep Pro or Keystep Artoria gear uses type B converters so that means you need to have the converter at the Artoria side and the converter at the Korg side and then use a 5 pin DIN cable the jury is still out from my perspective on the DIN MIDI spec it would be fine if everyone was all using the same converters but sadly they're not so it's a little bit of a faff I think more and more people are moving towards type A as it happens so it's more likely that gear will work with the Volcker than not but as I say for example the Artoria step series worked so just one more thing related to MIDI 4 we take a look at the updates to the editor as was the case on the original Volcker FM the new Volcker FM will still load DX7 patches a little known fact is that the original Volcker FM the way that it implemented its Cissex patch data was actually non-standard compared to the Yamaha if you ever loaded a DX7 patch on to the original Volcker FM and it didn't really sound like it did in Dext for example that was usually because the wrong operators were turned on and off and that's because the original Volcker FM added something to the patch data which allowed you to turn the operators on and off which is really useful from my perspective when creating an editor but it did mean that when you tended to load DX7 patches the wrong operators were turned on and off and it didn't sound the way that it should that is now fixed if you load a patch from a DX7 what the Volcker now does is it turns all of its operators on first so it still might not sound exactly as it did on the patch if that patch had operators turned off but it's more likely to sound right than it did previously that was one of the things that I've had to work around in order to update my editor as it happens so this is now more standard to the DX7 patch format and it's more likely to sound right when you import those patches which in most cases is going to be a good thing let's take a quick look at the editor as well so this is Synth Marta you'll find the link to it in the description of this video it is a completely free browser based online editor for the Volcker FM and also for the DX7 so all you need to use Synth Marta with your Volcker is a browser and a USB MIDI interface the browser will have to be chromium based so that's Chrome, Opera, Edge, Brave and other browsers as well it won't work with Safari unfortunately Apple haven't implemented Web MIDI it can work with Mozilla but you will need to install a Web MIDI plugin extension to make that work in terms of a USB MIDI interface if you've got an audio interface it's likely that you've got MIDI on that but if you haven't there are a number of options out there there are some very inexpensive sort of unbranded ones that you can get from Amazon eBay your mileage may vary with those I have one and it works fine but the number one reason for people asking for support with this editor when it's not working is one of these sort of unbranded USB MIDI interfaces for some reason they don't pass Cissex data properly the one that I usually recommend that I know works well and a number of users have told me it works well is the Roland UM1 Mark II it's fairly inexpensive it's a little bit more expensive than these super cheap ones but not by much that one works really well a couple of other ones I know don't work the step series from Artoria those controllers are not true MIDI interfaces so they don't work that actually goes for quite a lot of sort of controller keyboards with USB connectivity they don't necessarily pass patches properly that's just something to look out for so in case you haven't seen it before I'll just give you a quick guided tour of the interface when you first arrive at the page so if I just refresh this here you may be prompted to allow the page to have access to your MIDI devices you're going to want to click allow there obviously if you click block then there's a little icon in the address bar which you can use to allow it again down here in the setup the first thing you'll want to do is make sure that your MIDI device has been selected if you have multiple MIDI devices and also the MIDI channel on the Volca this should always be MIDI channel 1 if you're using it for the DX7 you set it to the MIDI channel that you're using you can then choose which of the modes you're going to be using so you've got the original Volca the new one and also Yamaha mode or DX7 and also DX200 so in our case we will select the new Volcraf M mode on the side here we have a place to load and save SysX this uses a single patch format not the cartridge patch format which you find a lot of online unfortunately so if you can't load SysX into Simulator it's probably because it's the cartridge format it's important to send the patch as it currently is in case it hasn't been sent automatically a really important button which is the init patch which sends an initialised patch to the Volca so you have a good starting point and also this create shareable patch link what this will do is generate a URL in this box here which will contain all of the information to rebuild the patch so if you want to share your patches with someone you can just send them a link and that's a way of sharing the patches so the first part of the interface here is the randomized so I've moved this to the top because I think it's probably a really really useful thing to have what this interface does is it will automatically generate a patch based on the settings of the slider so you can kind of decide what kind of patch you want to create so if I want to have a sort of slightly atonal, fairly complex bright-ish sound that's not very hard doesn't really have much hit to it maybe has a bit of a twang to it it's fairly long and paddy has a little bit of wobble which is your pitch modulation and a little bit of wobble which is more of your sort of amplitude modulation and now if I click new patch and just lean over and play my Volca it's created a patch based on those sorts of suggestions and if I press it again it'll create a new one this one's very long some lovely glossy overtones maybe we decide that we want things a bit more wobbly and a bit more wobbly and not as bright but more complex not as atonal and we can click new patch again we'll get another one it's a classic FM sound isn't it so this can be a really really ooh, that's cool this can be a really great way to create patches or find inspirations for new patches honestly when I'm making patches for jams these days I basically just use a randomizer I choose the kind of sound that I want to create I click new patch until I hit sponsored and I like and then job's good and we have got a patch if you want to make things from scratch perhaps we'll go into a new patch here yes please basically we have our operator on and off controls here I have got a workaround so that this still works with the new Volcker FM despite the fact that you can't actually turn them on and off properly at the moment so here we can turn our operators on and off and then we have basically the same interface for each of the six operators on the synth which has control over our envelope remember that the envelopes are talking about rates and not times so you want to turn it up to make it move faster rather than down as you would on other sort of ADSR type synths so turn that down to make our release longer for example we have all the stuff with the operator scaling the operator tuning, the operator levels and sensitivity so setting whether they're going to be modulated key modulated etc etc a new feature that I've added now is that we now have copy and paste between the operator so if I want to take this operator and paste it into operator 2 we can just click copy and then paste operator 2 which is very useful if you're creating sort of pseudo analog arrangements where you have multiple operators I should have added this a long time ago but we've added it now and then down at the bottom you have the global voice control so choosing the algorithm the feedback that sort of thing we've got our pitch envelope here and our LFO settings here and then finally the patch name and this will be sent to the Volcker as well just to make sure when you have created a patch that you like that you do save it onto your Volcker if you want to actually have it stored on the Volcker by hitting the save button choosing a position to save it in and then hitting the save button a second time but of course if you don't want to save it to your Volcker and you want to use it again you can always save it by saving the SysX or honestly the way I was just doing it is to just use the shareable patch link instead so as I mentioned this is entirely free there's no ads or anything on here no JavaScript nasties just the stuff that's required to create the functionality so please use it with my blessing if you want to use it in an offline environment you can head to my Github page which I'll also link to in the description and you can download the entire site it will work fine offline except a couple of the fonts might look different but the functionality will all be there so if you have a studio computer that's not connected to the internet you can use it there it also works on Android devices as well but not on iOS devices unfortunately because of the web midi issue while I'm mentioning the Github page if you want to contribute to the project if there's a feature that you'd like to see and you're a coder then I'm always happy to chat either leaving an issue or just issuing a pull request that's absolutely fine also on the repository there is my library which I think I mentioned in the instructions actually called C-Synthemata which is a library which you can build your own midi editors using just HTML and CSFS if you want to style it it sort of hooks up all the midi stuff for you and makes that already straightforward that's what I use to build my Volkadrum editor for example anyway I hope that was useful and interesting and I hope you get good use out of C-Synthemata if you did enjoy the video and if you do like C-Synthemata then please feel free to leave a like on the video make sure you subscribe to the channel for more synth fun coming up always but other than that and until next time take care