Animal Collective turn to Korg M3 for next album

Animal Collective
Animal Collective

A few avid Animal Collective fans on the MusicRadar team went to check out the experimental noise makers in person last month (our own avid Twitter followers will testify to it). They're an intriguing band to watch live, and so was their onstage setup.

Among the wires was, in fact, a Kaoss Pad and a Korg M3 with Collective member Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) at the helm…

"The other guys used the Kaoss Pads on the record," Panda Bear told Korg when asked about touring last album Merriweather Post Pavilion. "I hadn't gotten the M3 until after the recording of that release was over, but I'm planning to use the M3 nearly exclusively to make my new songs."

"I'm planning to use the M3 nearly exclusively to make my new songs," Panda Bear

"I really like the arpeggiator and the Karma engine," he continued regarding favourite M3 features. "I feel like I can get all kinds of sounds just using combinations of those two."

"I don't use a keyboard at all, although sometimes I'll hook up a guitar with a MIDI pickup, because it's fun to see how things end up melodically and structurally that way."

You can read the full Korg interview here, and more about that "Karma engine" here.

(Via: Stereogum)

Tom Porter worked on MusicRadar from its mid-2007 launch date to 2011, covering a range of music and music making topics, across features, gear news, reviews, interviews and more. A regular NAMM-goer back in the day, Tom now resides permanently in Los Angeles, where he's doing rather well at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).