TAMING THE TRITON
Jun 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Clark Salisbury
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Korg Triton owners know that calling the Triton just another synthesizer doesn't do it justice. With all the Triton's functions and features, it's more like vast, uncharted terrain, waiting to be explored. In Triton territory the creative adventurer can travel in any direction and discover limitless musical riches.
Trying to explain all there is to know about the Triton is an exercise in futility. In this article I'll reveal some less-than-obvious maneuvers for you to try at home or in the studio. Pointing you in the right direction will help you save time and get your creative juices flowing in new ways.
Without getting too basic, I'll try to be as clear as possible about what operations to perform. If you need help with the fundamentals, a lot of information is available. Check out the sidebar “Get Linked” if you need somewhere to begin.
COSMIC STRING THEORY
Because I'm a guitarist, editing a guitar patch seems like a good starting point. Strap on your favorite pair of rock 'n' roll shoes, and I'll call up program A037: Wet Dist Guitar.
Select the sound and then hit P8: Edit — Insert Effect, or just press Menu and then 8. Turning off the effects makes hearing the edits easier. There's more than one way to disable the effects, but for now, touch the Insert FX tab. You'll find that only one insert effect is being used, 006: OD/Hi.Gain Wah, assigned to IFX1. Touch the on/off switch on the touch screen to turn the effect off. Repeat that process for the Master Effects: hit Menu followed by 9, select the Master FX tab, and turn MFX1 and MFX2 off.
You can mute the effects from the Global menu, but I prefer to switch them off at the program level. That lets you hear the original sound — with effects — by hitting the Compare key.
Now set up SW1 to toggle between a normal distorted guitar sound and a muted guitar sound. (That function isn't directly supported in the Triton, but don't let that stop you.) To choose the oscillators you'll use, touch Menu, 1, and then the OSC Basic tab. That program is in Double Oscillator mode, with a velocity switch on the first oscillator.
You can leave Oscillator 1 as it is, but select a muted guitar wave for the second oscillator. Press OSC Basic and select ROM wave 151: Dist.Gtr-Mute as the high OSC2 multisample. Because no velocity switching is applied to Oscillator 2, there's no need for concern about the low multisample.
Now set up SW1 to control which oscillator will sound. First turn off the pitch shift that occurs when you hit SW1. Hit Menu and then 2 to move to P2: Edit — Pitch. Select the OSC1 P.Mod tab and set the LFO 2 AMS source to off, or make sure its intensity is set to +00.00.
You may wonder what LFO2 has to do with the pitch transpose effect assigned to SW1 — a sneaky bit of programming that can come in handy. LFO2 has been assigned a square wave that produces a constant positive output followed by an abrupt change to a negative output, which also remains constant until the abrupt shift back to positive. Hit Menu, 5, and then the OSC1 LFO2 tab to look at that setup.
Normally a square wave might produce a trill effect, but LFO2 is cycling at its lowest frequency, which is quite slow. The low-frequency oscillator (LFO) takes more than 30 seconds to run through the first half of its cycle and then switch from positive to negative. When the LFO is applied to oscillator pitch and you use SW1 to essentially turn LFO2 on and off, SW1 becomes, in effect, a transpose switch.
You can slow LFO2 down even further, increasing the length of time the pitch remains transposed. Assign SW1: CC#80 to AMS1 and AMS2 in the Frequency Modulation field, and set the Intensity for both to — 99 (see Fig. 1). That will produce an extremely long LFO cycle; I stopped timing it after three minutes, and it still hadn't completed the first half of its cycle.
You can use the same trick to mute Oscillator 1. Move to P4: Edit — Amp and touch the Amp1 Mod. tab. Set the LFO2 AMS source to SW1: CC#80, and set its intensity to — 99. Now play a note and hit SW1. The Oscillator 1 sound should mute, leaving only the muted distortion guitar sound assigned to Oscillator 2. Tap SW1 again, and the sound should return.
THE OL' SWITCHEROO
Next, set up the patch so that the Oscillator 2 sound is muted when SW1 is off, letting you switch between Oscillator 1 and Oscillator 2. You might assume that a variation of the control setup you used for Oscillator 1 works, but it doesn't, because amp modulation is applied as a multiple of initial amp level. If you start with a level of 0 and multiply it by applying LFO2, you can guess what happens — nothing. It doesn't matter by how much you multiply a volume of 0; the result will still be 0.
You can, however, use LFO2 to modulate the amp envelope. Press SW1 to mute Oscillator 1. Move to P4: Edit — Amp and press the Amp2 EG tab. From there, you can adjust the envelope so it sounds a bit more like that of a muted guitar. I like these settings:
| Level | Start | +99 | Attack | +99 |
| Break | +00 | Sustain | +00 | |
| Time | Attack | 05 | Decay | 50 |
| Slope | 00 | Release | 30 |
They provide a quicker, more mutelike sound. Now get tricky and change the Start and Attack values to +00; leave the other values as they are.
With the Amp envelope levels set to 0, no sound is produced when you play the keyboard. In the screen's Level Modulation section, set AMS to SW1: CC#80, Intensity to +99, Start and Attack to +, and leave Break at 0. That drives the Start and tack levels to +99 when SW1 is pressed, and when you play, you'll hear the muted guitar sound. Turn off SW1 to hear the sustained guitar sound and turn on SW1 to hear the muted guitar sound (see Fig. 2).
Wondering why you went through all that to drive the Oscillator 1 Amp level with LFO2 when you could have used SW1 directly to modulate the Amp envelope levels, as you did with Oscillator 2? The reason is apparent if you try it: there's no control input for the Amp envelope sustain level. Either you have to set sustain to 0, causing your guitar sound to eventually decay, or you have to leave sustain set to some positive value. Unfortunately, that causes the sustaining sound to eventually fade back in if you hold the keys down when you play the muted sound. The method I chose might seem a bit roundabout, but it produces the best result.
Finally, if you prefer to have the mute function available only when you hold down SW1, change SW1 from Toggle to Momentary at the Controller tab of P1: Edit — Basic. That edit also allows you to use SW1 like a real-time tremolo control: just hold a note or chord on the keyboard and bounce your finger up and down on SW1.
WHAMMY-BAMMY
Next, make a few more changes to the sound of your guitar. With its dual-axis joystick, the Triton is well suited for whammy bar effects. You can use the x-axis to control standard bends — whole-step, for example, as in your current patch — and use the y-axis to play the virtual guitar's whammy bar. In this case, leave the joystick's positive y-axis alone; it can continue to control LFO1 vibrato. Assign the negative y-axis to control downward pitch bend.
If you pull the joystick down, it increases Oscillator 1 attack time, so disable that modulation routing. Move to P4: Edit — Amp, touch the Amp1 EG tab, and set AMS2 (in the Time Modulation section) to off. Attack time will remain constant no matter how you move the joystick.
Next, head to P2: Edit — Pitch and touch the OSC1 P.Mod tab. Oops! An Alternate Mod Source (AMS) — the Slider, CC#18 — is already assigned to control pitch. You can reassign it, but that's for wimps.
Because LFO2 is already set up as a parameter driver (you have been following along, right?), you can assign the joystick to control the effect on oscillator pitch. For LFO2, set the AMS to JS-Y: CC#02 and set Intensity for the effect you want to produce. For downward bends — analogous to what real whammy bars do — use negative numbers. That sets up the whammy effect for Oscillator 1. To apply the effect to Oscillator 2 as well, replicate the setting for Oscillator 1 (see Fig. 3).
THROUGH A STACK
Here is something I have learned as a guitarist: if you can't get the effect you want out of a stompbox, plug in more stompboxes. With five inserts and two master effects processors, the Triton is jammed full of stompboxes.
For a sound that isn't possible with just one effect, try stacking two or more of the same effect or similar effects. For example, stacking two or more distortion effects makes it possible to produce a much nastier distortion than you can get with a single distortion. Go to P8: Edit — Insert Effect, touch the Insert FX tab, and turn IFX1 back on (you turned it off at the beginning) by pressing the button in the upper-right corner of the IFX1 window. Assign the same effect to IFX2; touch the triangle next to 000: No Effect, hit the Filter/Dynamic tab, select 006: OD/Hi.Gain Wah, and press OK. Touch the Chain checkbox next to IFX1 to pass the signal to IFX 2. Turn IFX2 on and listen to the result (see Fig. 4). Pretty gnarly, huh? Now get the effect under control.
Use SW2 to bring the effect in and out, but first switch SW2 from its current function — portamento control — to its basic switch function. Go to P1: Edit — Basic and touch the Controller tab. Select SW2 in the upper-right corner and change it to SW2 Mod.: CC#81. Return to P8: Edit — Insert Effect and select the IFX2 tab.
Change the Wet/Dry mix parameter to Dry. Just to the right, select the source parameter (Src:) and dial up SW2: CC#81. Set the Amount to +100, or less if you don't want so much distortion. When you hit SW2, the extra distortion effect will kick in — perfect for that death-metal polka you've been working on!
For even more fun, assign SW2 to turn on the Wah effect. Switch on the Wah parameter, set its source to SW2 CC#81, and make sure that the switch parameter (Sw:) is set to Moment (see Fig. 5). The switch will toggle the effect on and off even though it's set to momentary, because SW2 is already configured for toggle mode at the Edit-Basic page.
Set the Wah Sweep Range to something such as — 4 and change the Wah Sweep Src: to Aftertouch. Notice that Aftertouch is already being used for LFO-controlled vibrato. To turn that routing off, go to P2: Edit — Pitch. On the OSC1 and OSC2 P.Mod pages, set AMS to off for LFO1.
EFFECTIVE DISORDER
As you might suspect, the Triton effects can do a lot more than wah-wah. The immense flexibility of the effects and the busing system can be a bit overwhelming, particularly in Combi (combination) mode. The following examples are some less-than-obvious applications.
Because you have two or more effects chained together doesn't mean you have to use all the effects in the chain to process any part in particular. For example, call up combination A112: Acoustic Mix. That combination has six assigned sounds, two of which are used to produce the arpeggiator pattern. Track 1 has an acoustic piano, and track 2 has an acoustic guitar; the other sounds are irrelevant.
Move to P8: Edit — Insert Effect and touch the Routing tab. Look at the FX Routing diagram in the upper right of the display. You'll find that all five effects are used, with IFX1 chained into IFX2, and the other insert effects are running in parallel. Check out the IFX/Indiv.Out Bus Select settings on the page to see that the piano is routed to IFX1 (an EQ) and the guitar is routed to IFX3 (another EQ). IFX1, in turn, is routed into IFX2 (a reverb) on its way to the output. IFX3 is routed directly to the output.
To run the guitar through a reverb, route the guitar to IFX2. That processes the guitar through the reverb used by the piano while bypassing the piano's EQ stage.
Now make things a bit more obvious. First, turn off the sounds assigned to Combi parts 3 and 4; you're only interested in the guitar and piano. Hit Menu and then 0 to move to the Play page. Select the Status tab for part 3 and set it to off; likewise, turn off part 4.
Now go back to P8: Edit — Insert Effect. Touch the Insert FX tab and then touch the checkbox to the left of IFX2. That sends IFX2's output to IFX3's input. Next, touch the effect-select triangle in the IFX1 field and switch the effect from 008: St. Graphic 7EQ to 020: Stereo Flanger, which you can gain access to by touching the Pitch/Phase Mod. tab. Similarly, change IFX2 to 054: Reverb Wet Plate and IFX3 to 056: Reverb Room. Finally, touch the Routing tab and route the piano into IFX3 and the guitar into IFX1. If you listen to the result, you'll hear that the guitar is flanged and drenched in reverb, but the piano is relatively unprocessed. You can also send the piano signal to IFX2, which routes it through the plate reverb and the room reverb.
Chaining a pair of reverbs together often produces a more lush, animated sound. Don't think of an effects chain as an entity with a single input and output; it's much more flexible than that. For example, imagine that you have only two internal effects available and two or more sounds that require reverb — one of which is an electric guitar. You'd love to use distortion for only the guitar, and you want to have a reverb available not only for the guitar but also for other sounds. Simply chain a distortion effect to a reverb; then assign the guitar to the distortion at the chain's beginning and other sounds to the chain's reverb part. The guitar will have distortion and reverb, and the other sounds will get only the reverb.
MIX MONSTER EFFECTS
Can't decide whether to spend your paycheck on that vintage drum machine or the latest outboard effects? Get the drum machine. You can use the Triton's effects to spice up audio tracks, not just internal sounds. Here's how to make the hookup.
Plug the Triton's main L/R outputs in to a stereo aux return or a pair of channels on your mixer; that serves as your stereo effects return bus. Next, plug at least one of the Triton's individual bus outs in to an input of your mixer. To send stereo sounds to the mixer, you need to use at least two contiguous outputs, such as 1 and 2, or 3 and 4. Then plug a couple of cables from your mixer's stereo effects send or a pair of aux outs in to the Triton's audio inputs. Be careful — with that sort of setup, it's easy to lose track of where you are and bus an aux output back to its input, sending yourself a surprise dose of feedback. I recommend turning all pertinent mixer faders down until the setup is complete and then gently testing everything.
That completes the physical routing of signals (see Fig. 6), so move on to the Triton's internal routing. First, touch Global, then Menu followed by 0, and finally the Audio Input tab. At this point route the audio input signal to the effects. In the Input1 and Input2 fields, set the Bus (IFX/Indiv.) Select to L/R; that routes the audio input to the Triton's L/R bus. Set each input Level to 127 and set Pan to C064 (center). Centering the pan lets the effects operate in full stereo.
Finally, in the Input1 field, set Send1 (to MFX1) to 127 and Send2 (to MFX2) to 000. Then do the opposite for Input2 by setting Send1 (to MFX1) to 000 and Send2 (to MFX2) to 127. That sets up each of the Triton's audio inputs to function as a separate effects bus. Input1 is routed to MFX1, and Input2 is routed to MFX2.
By now you should be able to add Triton effects to any of your mixer inputs. To try that out, send a signal to a mixer input — maybe a drum machine or CD, for test purposes — and raise the effects send (or aux send, if that's what you're using) associated with that input. Check out the Triton's input levels by hitting Sampling, selecting the Input Setup tab, and pressing the Rec/Write button. That displays the Triton's input meters, where you can see your input signal level. (The signal from the L/R outs is muted during metering; it comes back when you leave sampling mode.) If the signal is too high or too low, you can use the input trim knob on the back of the Triton to make adjustments, not the recording-level control on the sampling page.
Once you've set the level, press the Combi button and select a combination with a couple of master effects you like. Combination A001: Lonely Moon might make a good starting point because it uses a delay for MFX1 and a reverb for MFX2. Slowly raise the level of whatever you're using for effects returns at the mixer and make sure the Triton's volume slider is up. You should hear the Triton's effects applied to your source material. After you set an appropriate level, listen to the effects with only the first mixer send turned up and then only the second mixer send. If everything has gone according to plan, one send should control the reverb amount and the other should control the delay amount.
Now that you can control the Triton effects levels from your mixer, you can set the master effects bus in the Triton to full on and fully wet. Move to P9: Edit — Master Effect and touch the Master FX tab. Look at Return 1 and Return 2 in the display; if either level is below 127, you get dry signal mixed in with the effected signal. Also pay attention to the chain setup; if the box to the left of the MFX1 and MFX2 fields is checked, one effect's output will be chained into the other, which probably isn't what you want. Touch the MFX1 tab to check the setting for Wet/Dry at the bottom of the page. If that isn't set to Wet, you'll be mixing dry signal in with the effected signal. Be sure to perform that check for MFX2 as well.
TAKE AN ALTERNATE ROUTE
If you try to do any playing or sequencing with the Triton after you make those changes, you will discover that sounds from the Triton appear at the L/R outs, which send them to your mixer's effects return inputs. That problem is easy to remedy — just reassign any wanted Triton sounds to the individual outs.
Reassigning output routings is probably best done from Combi mode; that lets you avoid rewriting individual programs with new output bus settings. You can either send a sound directly to one or two of the individual outs or bus the insert effects to the individual outs. The latter is probably quicker, because it is likely that every sound in a combination will be routed to at least one insert effect. Move to P8: Edit — Insert Effect and touch the Insert FX tab. For each of the insert effects assigned to the L/R output (found in the Bus Sel. column), switch the routing to an individual output or, for stereo sounds, to a pair of outputs. For example, select the tab to the right of the IFX1 field and change it from L/R to 1/2 (you could use output 1 alone, but this wouldn't preserve the stereo image generated by the chorus effect assigned to IFX1). Repeat that procedure for any other insert effects that the combination uses.
Check that none of the other sounds in the combination are routed to the L/R or individual outs. Touch the Routing tab; you'll notice that sounds 6, 7, and 8 are routed to the L/R outs. However, if you check the Play page, you'll see that those sounds are turned off. If any sounds had been routed directly to the L/R outs, you would have wanted to redirect them to the individual outs so they wouldn't be mixed into your effects bus.
Once you've assigned the IFX buses to the individual outputs — as well as any sounds you want to bus directly, bypassing the internal effects — it's a simple matter to run cables from the Triton's individual outputs to your mixer's inputs. To apply the master effects to those sounds, just increase your mixer's effects send for the inputs you're using with the Triton direct outs.
JACK THE RPPR
Listen up, trance fans. The following procedure concerns using the Real-time Pattern Play Record (RPPR) function to generate complex control data. You already know that with the RPPR function you can trigger pattern playback by pressing keys on the keyboard. But those patterns don't have to contain note data; they can just as easily contain sequences of complex controller moves. Recorded controller moves can be applied in real time to any sound you choose. Think of the RPPR as an extremely sophisticated function generator capable of controlling nearly any parameter or combination of parameters you wish.
Press the Seq button, create a new song, and assign a synth sound to the first track. Choose a Program with interesting controller variations — perhaps something such as A008: Rez. Down. Move to P6: Pattern/RPPR and touch the Pattern Edit tab. Either select a blank User Pattern to record or erase an unneeded User Pattern. Touch the pull-down tab in the upper-right corner of the screen and choose Pattern Parameter. The screen that results prompts you to set the length and meter of the pattern. Set the pattern for something not too short — eight measures or so — and leave the meter set to 4/4 (you can try other time signatures later).
Now set the tempo to something not too fast and hit the Rec/Write button. You should hear the metronome start up. When you're ready, hit the Start/Stop button, and after the count off, play and hold a single note. While holding the note, mess around with the controllers: tap your finger up and down on the ribbon, move the joystick around, vary the real-time control knobs, and so on.
When you're done, hit the Start/Stop button to stop recording
and touch the RPPR Setup tab. Put a check mark in the Assign box in
the RPPR Setup section. In the lower part of the screen are
controls for selecting the pattern to assign to any particular key.
Assign the pattern but make sure it's the pattern you've been
working with. (If you want to follow my lead, I recorded into User
Pattern 01 and assigned it to C
To test your new pattern, go back to P0: Play/Rec. Make sure the
RPPR box in the upper right is checked, and play the key your
pattern is assigned to (in my case, it's
C
Get ready for the cool part. Go back to P6: Pattern/RPPR, touch the Pattern Edit tab, and select Event Edit from the pull-down menu. In the resulting Set Event Filters dialog box, uncheck everything except Note; you don't want to wade through all the controller data stuffed into that pattern (see Fig. 7). Touch OK, and you should see an event list with a single event — the note you played when creating the pattern. Select the event and touch Cut to remove it (see Fig. 8). Now touch Done.
Return to P0: Play/Rec and select the track used for the new
pattern — in this case track 1. Play a few notes to see that
the Triton functions normally. Hold a note or chord and then hit
C
Data you generate with that technique can have all sorts of practical applications. You can create RPPR presets for fades, ultraquick pitch bends (record the data at a slow tempo and then speed it up for playback), and syncopated tremolos and filter sweeps, or you can radically alter a sound instantly or over a long period. You can come up with dozens of applications.
TERRA INCOGNITA
I've only covered a fraction of the things you can coax the Triton into doing, but hopefully I've given you a springboard to launch some of your own ideas. After all, there's still a lot of uncharted territory in Triton country.
Clark Salisbury's so-called life is based in Portland, Oregon, with an excellent wife and four cats. Special thanks to Jerry Kovarsky at Korg USA.
GET LINKED
Triton enthusiasts abound, and lots of them can be found on the Web. Here are a few sites featuring Triton resources, including mailing lists, archives, and shareware applications:
Kevin Goodman's
Trinitro Editor-Librarian (Win)
http://magi.com/~goodmank
Korg
www.korg.com
Korg Triton Online Resource Center
www.paxtani.com/triton
Triton Archive
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/triton_archive
Triton Central
www.tapesh.com/triton
Triton Galaxy
www.tritongalaxy.com
The Triton Hardware Corner
www.pvv.ntnu.no/~knutinh/tritonhardware
Triton Haven
www.trinhaven.com
Triton Users
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/triton_users
The Triton Zone
http://209.35.182.75/trinityhaven/HTML/tritonHOME.htm
Vancesoft Triton Librarian (Win)
http://vancesoft.com/triton
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