Korg is known for many things in the music industry, not the least of which is the company’s synth tech. Korg recently decided to dive into the Apple app store with iElectribe, a digital version of the company’s Electribe series of rhythm synthesizer. Does it stack up? If our experience is anything to go by, then you bet it does.
iElectribe offers up 64 pre-set patterns ranging in genre from House to Hardcore, which allow the user to get up and going without having to create anything from scratch. The application also has 32 templates in a similarly large range of genres; this gives a basic framework which, with a little work, can turn into some pretty elaborate beats. For those who want total control, iElectribe has 64 user banks that have nothing more than a single synth trigger on the downbeat of each measure. You can load or write to any of these files using the browser functionality located underneath the application’s faux LCD.
Korg gives you eight basic sounds to work with, including a handful of synths, an open and closed hi-hat, a cymbal, and a clap/snare that can be toggled by changing the waveform. Eight sounds might not seem like much, but with the software’s ability to manipulate sounds at the most basic of levels, the number of sounds that can be created is almost limitless.
You can alter each sample’s pitch or wave form with a pair of virtual knobs, and the waveform can be switched between sine, triangle, pulse, and sawtooth waves. Similarly, you can control pitch modulation depth and speed. Modulation waveforms include saw down, square, triangle, sample and hold, noise, and envelope, and offer quite a bit of variation.
Users can also set the level of each individual sample, pan it to the left and right, add or subtract decay, or add a bit of boosting in the low-end. Since the hardware versions of the Electribe series are tube driven, the iElectribe is no different, in the virtual sense. Adjustments can be made to the amount of gain created by the virtual tubes, which coincides with glowing tubes of varying intensity in the top-center of the app. For a sample of what the default samples sound like, view the embedded movie below.
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