For about a year in the late-90s I ran jam sessions in a church hall in the West End, inviting people I thought were cool on the free improv scene to just hang for an evening and play without an audience or any real agenda. Two decades later, a recording of one of those sessions has emerged.

I've been tinkering with JUCE projects over the last few weeks but then discovered that Dexed uses it. I'm pretty familiar with Dexed and what I want to make isn't a million miles away from it, so I decided to grab its source code and see what I could learn from it. What followed was a series of small gotchas that are the reason for this post.

I thought a brief word was in order to explain the apparent change of direction of this blog of late. This is that brief word. In short, as the heading suggests, a lot is staying the same but the perspective is changing.

This is a quick brain-dump of what I've learned over the past two weeks about the Volca FM.

Dexed is a free VST plugin that emulates (and acts as an interface for) the Yamaha DX7, the first commercial keyboard to use FM synthesis. The DX7 came out in 1983 and was a huge seller and was responsible for many of the iconic sounds of '80s electro-pop, but it was also an incredibly sophisticated synth engine.

In a previous post I made some observations about what I call the Augmented Hexatonic (1 b2 3 4 #5 6). Here I pull some harmony out of the resulting scales. You should probably read the earlier post before getting into this one.

I've recently acquired a basic synth setup with a view to exploring some non-standard tunings. This is something I've messed with in the past and used for "colour" but never really got deeply into, but that's about to change.

In my own practice I've been making less use of scale and arpeggio language lately and looking at more neutral, atonal terminology instead. There's a good chance this will show up in some upcoming posts so here's a primer.

Continuing my look at 3- and 4-note sets that aren't common in diatonic music, we arrive at 1-b2-3, the "Phyrgian major" or "Harmonic minor" triad. first here's the usual full-fingerboard diagrams: chords are formed by playing one note of each colour and dark blue is the root. The top one is 1-b2-3 and the bottom is 1-#5-7, its inversion; these are Forte number 3-3:

The Whole Tone Scale, 1 2 3 #4 #5 b7, has quite a few interesting subsets, including the well-known augmented triad and the dominant chords 7b5 and 7#5. Today we'll look at the "triad" 1-3-#4 and its inversion, 1-3-b7. These are known by the Forte number 3-10.