![\"stylophone\"](\"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/stylophone.jpg\")
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The Stylophone, as most readers of this blog probably know, is a musical toy made famous by David Bowie’s<\/a> use of it in the track Space Oddity<\/a>. I own one but honestly, it’s kind of hard to play, and even harder to fit into a mix. Playing evenly with a stylus takes practice and its tones are harsh and nasal.<\/p>\n But it’s 2014. Anything can be made to sound like anything.<\/p>\n I picked up a Korg Mini Kaoss Pad 2<\/a> on a whim, and like Korg’s Volca and Monotron<\/a> range, it’s not great<\/em>…but it’s an amazing value<\/em> for the price. What it lacks in configurability and customization it makes up for in expressiveness, immediacy, and convenience. In playing with its onboard loopers – especially the Overdub Looper effect – I realized that I’d never heard Stylophones playing chords. Something new to try…<\/p>\n So, bear with me on how today’s piece came about. The Stylophone’s leftmost tone switch position gives some low-end growl below the E key, and recording it via the headphone out smooths the sound, compared to miking the tiny onboard speaker.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span>I set the MiniKaoss Pad’s Overdub Looper to a certain BPM and build a series of chords on the Stylophone, and used the Mini Kaoss Pad 2’s ability to record directly to an onboard microSD card.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span>The loop points are obvious but intentional and rhythmic, creating an interesting sound, not unlike the Samplr snippet I posted a few months back<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n Then I ran that through Michael Norris<\/a>‘ Spectral Blur plugin to make a hazy, dreamlike wash that communicated what I wanted. Everything else then fell into place, including a TR-606<\/a> run through a vintage mono cassette deck<\/a>, my beloved BugBrand DRM-1<\/a>, and one of my favorite software synths, TAL Bassline 101<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n [soundcloud url=”https:\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/209445429″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” \/]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Stylophone, as most readers of this blog probably know, is a musical toy made famous by David Bowie’s use of it in the track Space Oddity. I own one but honestly, it’s kind of hard to play, and even harder to fit into a mix. Playing evenly with a stylus takes practice and its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,6],"tags":[312,322,304,311],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2973"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3114,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973\/revisions\/3114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noisejockey.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}