Korg Intros Volca Kick Analog Kick, Bass & Sub-Bass Synthesizer

Korg has announced the Volca Kick – a new member of their compact electronic music instrument series, designed for analog percussive and chromatic kick, bass and sub bass sounds.

The Korg Volca Kick is ‘all about massive kicks, toms, and basses’, according to the company. It starts with a true analog oscillator and offers drive and MS-20 resonator circuits to shape ‘earth-shattering sounds’ that can be played and sequenced chromatically.

As opposed to generating sounds using a typical sine wave, the Volca Kick starts with the sound of an oscillating filter from the original MS-20. The filter of the MS-20 self-oscillates when resonance is increased to the maximum, and this is used to produce powerful kick sounds, ranging from solid kick drums to crisp kick basses with complex overtones.

The Volca Kick’s 16-step sequencer has a new Touch FX feature, which provides one-touch sequencer variations and time division, to introduce more live performance potential.

The pattern chain function lets you connect multiple sequence patterns for successive playback, making it possible to construct large-scale productions of 32, 64, or even 256 steps, by joining up to 16 sequences.

“Like all volcas, kick has a personality all its own, and combining it with other volcas or any other hardware adds unique character to users’ setups,” says Korg’s James Sajeva. “The familiar Audio Sync connection means it plays exceptionally well with other volcas, minilogue, electribe and SQ-1, and the MIDI IN jack lets you use the volca kick as a sound module via DAW or MIDI controller.”

With its compact size, battery operation, and built-in speaker, the volca kick can be taken anywhere.

Video Intro:

Audio Demos:

Pricing and Availability

The Korg Volca Kick will be Available in October of 2016 for $159.99. See the Korg site for details.

80 thoughts on “Korg Intros Volca Kick Analog Kick, Bass & Sub-Bass Synthesizer”

  2. This is cool, but give us what we all want korg and make a volca mixer/fx. Or I would personally love for korg to make a super-volca that combines elements of all of them… Just imagine something sort of like an electribe, but it has 2-3 analog synth engines, the fm engine, maybe an analog percussion engine, but definitely the ability to play back samples, all tied to an awesome sequencer and a few good effects. Price it at around $700-800… I would buy three. Kinda of like korgs take on an elektron box, but with their own flavors

    2. Yes Korg, give as fully analog Volcstation – something like all analog Kronos with nice things like Volcoder and Volcbox, some digital delights on it, like FM, Z plane filters, sampling engine, + FX!

      1. UH……Your missing the whole point of a volca,

        Simplicity is what makes them so popular, they do ONE thing

        some Frankenstein garbage box that does everything?……..it’s called the E2 nobody likes it. or you could pick up a DJ808 those look greeeeeat

        2. Exactly, it’s not an easy fix, and you may be hard pressed to find a pro willing to risk it too. Plus if a pro does it, you nearly double the cost of the machine.

  4. Volca Modular next ?
    Complex dual osc + ramp generator + lpg for the West coast version
    Classic Moog style voice for the East Coast version
    Lots of patch points and under 200€ !

  9. Is that Tats himself rocking the new box in the video??!!
    Man he my favourite synth dveloper

    Hmm wait, an MS20 rev 1 filter for 150$? Pls tell me there are patch points on the PCB to mod an audio input to this one!

    2. To be fair, calling it a ‘ms-20 filter resonator’ is a bit of a marketing gimmick. Electrically, you could describe any oscillator as a ‘resonating’ filter. Understandable why they did it. A lot of classic kicks have come out of driving an MS-20 filter.

      1. “Electrically, you could describe any oscillator as a ‘resonating’ filter. ”

        Yes, but they get a lot of mileage out of the *self-resonating* functionality of the MS20 filter, hence the note.

    3. The thing that makes the ms-20 filter so great is that you have high pass and low pass…. Without both you’re not really getting the”legendary” sound.

      1. The original 3 were $149 when I bought them and for about the first year they were out. Now it’s going to cost nearly $1000 to collect all 6 and you still need a mixer and an amp.

  14. Awesome. Yes. More Volcas. I really wish they would do a Volca pad machine. Even if it was just a volca shaped digital poly (Volca sized microkorg). Or even just a Volca sequencer. Take the step sequencer and extend the sequence length and features, ship some kind of daisy chain-thru midi cable. That would be rad. KORG really knows how to get me to spend money I don’t have…

  16. Some of those soundcloud samples seem to have quite a high noise floor. Hard to tell how much is coming from the unit – there seems to be at least a little compression on some of those clips. Eventually passed along my volca keys because it was so noisy. I’d be interested to see how this compares.

    1. I have the first three models of Volcas and the outs are all noisy. Not sure if everyone has that problem, but I don’t have much luck getting anything clean out of them. Maybe I need to make noisier music.

      1. You can get a clean sound from the Volca Beats with minimal treatment. Open an EQ and an expander plugin on your audio input when tracking the Volca to your DAW. Hunt for noise using the EQ. Dip it out a bit. Let the expander do the rest. Adjust to taste of course.

        It’s not nearly as bad as the Rhythm Wolf however, I find the Rhythm Wolf to be a more enjoyable instrument.

        I enjoy a challenge. 😉

        2. or what I do is run it through a stereo>mono plug and then through my rocktron hush pedal (they are cheap). The noise floor is so low compared to a guitar with distortion that you barely have to turn it up to get a super clean signal.

    2. I expect it to be as noisy as my MS-20 mini. Anything else would be a disappointment. The noise of the Korg things I own have become a part of my sound and I love it 🙂 I remember trying the Elektron Analog Rytm. Not for me. Too clean.

  22. I think the Volcas are pretty fun tools but they are unfortunately useless to me until they offer 64 steps per pattern AND/OR more than 16 patterns in memory (min. 64). It can’t be that much more to add more memory. Even if it increased the cost by $50, I think it would be worth it.
    A “monster” volca as mentioned earlier (multiple volcas in one unit) with a elektron-esqe sequencer would be a game changer!

    1. “Even if it increased the cost by $50, I think it would be worth it.”

      It’s not for them. The people who can’t do this with pattern chaining are a niche market.

  23. Haha, love the youtube demo, sounds like the stuff I used to make back in the 90’s 🙂

    Miseur, with this Volca series you are really spoiling us…

    1. What kind of cable are you using? I had some obnoxious noise when I was using stereo (TRS) cables, but when I switched to mono (TS) cables (I use 1/8 inch male to 1/4 male so I can plug it into my mixer without an adapter) and the noise was greatly reduced. There’s still a bit of noise but it doesn’t bother me, although I see how it could be a nuisance to others. Hope this helps.

  27. People in Volca comment threads always have really great ideas for new Volcas. I am not being sarcastic. I think it is so cool that Korg continues to put out new things in this format. Basically: Korg, please make literally any new Volcas. Volca has the potential to be the poor man’s modular.

    1. ::looks at lowendtheory over over the top of my sunglasses as he walks by, as if to say: “now HERE is a serious, serious man with serious man instruments”::

  32. Has anyone seen any stands for the volca’s? Something like moogs 3 tier stand for the mother 32’s would be perfecto! I’m running out of space, even for these little guys!

  35. Oh my. Want. Bummer that they’ve not included a gate in for this one. Maybe there’s a trick to do it via one note sequence and the sync in? $150 for a yummy sounding OSC with plenty of tricks is cheap in modular land.

    1. yes I was wondering the same if you could switch the clock in to a gate in that would be fantastic if not currently I think it’s got to be a feature suggestion but you will probably be able to hack it any way

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