Collin's Lab: Atari Punk Console. Goodies for KORG monotribe, monotron, from Japanese Overlays to MIDI Mods. Monotribe, in limited silver and gold. Photo by Marsha Vdovin for CDM. It’s a beautiful thing when music hardware improves with age. And lately, that’s been what’s happening to Korg’s monotribe and monotron. Over the past few months, we’ve seen a major update from Korg for the monotribe that makes its sequencing functions easier and more useful.
To save you the trouble of navigating the Korg Japan site – a difficulty for those of us who don’t speak Japanese – here on CDM, we’ve got a number of downloads for saving monotron patches, and the Japan-exclusive overlay for the monotribe update. And, courtesy enterprising hackers in Brazil unassociated with Korg, a monotribe MIDI update gives the hardware the feature it sorely lacks. And how many videos do we have of all of this? Grab some downloads, and see what’s new: More on the System Version 2 update (in English): And in Japanese: Videos: monotribe v2. Korg Monotribe Drum Mods Kit. Din Sync: How to modify a Korg Monotron. So here's how to modify Korg's new Monotron analog ribbon synthesizer. Perhaps this is the first document of Monotron mods in Europe since it still hasn't been released here. It's actually a very easy machine to modify because for whatever reason Korg decided to label all the interesting points on the bottom side of the PCB.
This may well have been for testing units at the factory/service centers. Perhaps though it could have been that the designers anticipated this little machine would be hacked, much like the Gakken which pretty obviously inspired this piece. Incidentally in the magazine that comes with the Gakken there's a picture of them showing it to Korg, that was in 2008, go figure. Modification wise everything is simple enough except for the gate. After a little research I came across an idea to use a dtc114 transistor to trigger the gate (soldered at a different point). If you intend to use both battery power and dc power you should include some diodes in your design. Collin's Lab: Monotron Hacking. Monotron Hack with a Baby-8 Sequencer - CV and Gate. Casio SK1.