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October 2002


Novation K-Station Audio Examples

By David Battino

K-Station photo

This page contains some MP3 examples of patches I created during my review of the Novation K-Station in the October 2002 issue of Electronic Musician. Feel free to use them in your own music. I also recommend auditioning the MP3 demo on the Novation site; it's more extensive than the one built into the keyboard.

You can download my 17 original patches as a zipped Standard MIDI File. Decompress it, load it into a MIDI sequencer, and play it back into your K-Station to load the patches. Note that doing so will overwrite (replace) all patches in Bank 4, so be sure to back up any patches you've stored there first. My patches are at the end of the bank, in locations 483-499.

Here are the MP3s:

  1. The patch I used to produce this loop is a modified version of preset 132, Arpeggio4. I set the LFOs to do slow filter and pan sweeps and played a single chord:

    2. Evolving Arpeggio Loop (272 KB)

  2. The K-Station doesn't come with any drum sounds, so I created this kick-drum patch and used the arpeggiator to trigger it in a quarter-note rhythm. I then mapped the mod wheel to distortion, which you can hear on beats 1 and 3 of the loop's second iteration. On the third iteration, I added a second note an octave above the original to generate a tighter sound:

    3. Kick Loop (128 KB)

  3. For this percussive loop, I again used an LFO to sweep the filter, but triggered 16th-notes with the arpeggiator. For a syncopated effect, I set the delay to dotted eighth-notes:

    4. Percussive Accent Loop (80 KB)

  4. Here's another arpeggiator-driven percussive sound, this time with the filter resonance boosted. I modulated the filter with a square-wave LFO set to quarter-note triplets:

    5. Resonant Percussive Loop (64 KB)

  5. This sound is reminiscent of Lyle Mays's gentle, bendy leads on older Pat Metheny Group albums. It employs three triangle oscillators, with one transposed up by five semitones, and a pitch envelope applied inversely to the remaining two:

    6. Lyle Lead (104 KB)

  6. Using a fast initial pitch-bend and sawtooth oscillators added punch to this lead sound. I also used the mod wheel to bring in distortion:

    7. Pitch Punch (180 KB)

  7. Cranking the distortion way up produced this fuzzy sound:

    8. Distortion Riff (140 KB)

  8. The K-Station is ostensibly a monotimbral instrument, meaning it can produce only one sound at a time. However, I discovered that by increasing the envelope release times to the maximum, I could make a patch keep playing after I switched to a new one. If the settings (particularly the effects settings) are very different, you'll get clicks, but it's a useful hack. In this example, I play a wind sound, switch to a pad sound (note the clicks from the change in effects), then switch to a bass sound. The bass has no effects, so there's no clicking:

    9. Multitimbral Hack (356 KB)

  9. Here's another multitimbral example, moving from a string pad to a horn solo. I changed only the attack and release times to create the string patch; there are still clicks, but they're less obvious. Note how the sustaining sound bends along with the horn (unfortunately):

    10. Multitimbral Horn Example (308 KB)

  10. Here I imported examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 9 into Ableton Live and arranged them into a brief tune. Other than adjusting levels, I did no additional processing. This is what a multitimbral K-Station might sound like:

    11. All Together Now (1 MB)

     

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