I went to a client’s home in London to set up a Korg Triton Rack he had bought, which meant bringing its high output level down to suit his Focusrite OctoPre and getting MIDI from Logic Pro to it through an iConnectivity mioXL.
The Triton Rack is a sample-based unit from the 1990s. He had read about its vintage sounds and remembered it from his youth, so he bought one and wanted it working as part of his own system, played from Logic and run through a vintage reverb unit he had also bought.
Getting sound out of the Triton
First I got the power adaptor plugged in and the unit powered up. Then I found the main outputs and plugged them into free inputs on his Focusrite OctoPre. I could see the levels coming through, but the outputs were quite hot, so the gain staging needed sorting out.
The Triton Rack has a small button on the back that switches the dB rating of its outputs, and that is how I brought the level down.
I also turned down the input level on the OctoPre so it wasn’t boosting the signal too much. To hear it making sound before any MIDI was connected, I pressed the Demo button and we listened to some of the demos and the built-in presets.
Adding the vintage reverb
Putting it through his reverb unit was an easy job. We patched in a few extra cables and found a UK power adaptor for the reverb, and then we had the Triton running through it. We played with the reverb settings until it sounded tasteful, with a quiet reverb somewhere between a room and a hall to give the sounds some richness.
Playing it from Logic
For MIDI, we connected output 10 on his iConnectivity mioXL to the Triton. To make that work we had to change the routing in iConnectivity’s Auracle software. I plan to write up Auracle as a separate case study.
- MIDI cable from mioXL output 10 to the Triton.
- Routing changed in Auracle.
- The Triton’s ports named in Audio MIDI Setup on the Mac.
- An external instrument created for the Triton in Logic, linked to host out 3, going to output 10.
The names you write in Audio MIDI Setup show up in Logic, which is why we named the Triton’s ports there first and then created the external instrument in Logic.
To test it, I opened Logic and used a pattern generator to play a few basic melodies through the Triton, then skipped through some of its presets. It sounded fantastic, a proper hardware sound. I’ve also written up a Prophet-6 played from Logic through a mioXL, where notes were doubling and the arpeggiator needed syncing, if you’re connecting other hardware synths.
As for why hardware like this sounds different, I would say it’s because you’re hearing real electricity being generated rather than algorithmic representations of it. I’ll write about that separately.
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