Gamegerming With the K.O. II

If you’re familiar with Tapegerm and its relatively new game, you may be interested to know that it plays well with Teenage Engineering’s new K.O. II EP-133 sample composer device.

The featured image is a screenshot of it’s Sample Tool which is TE’s handy way of managing samples. When you play a game with tapegerms you go to the gamegerm page at tapegerm.com and you’re presented with 10 source audio files which you must use in a new composition.

What I’ve done with my first attempt is download my random set of sources and load them into the K.O. II. This is a simple drag and drop procedure using the Sample Tool.

Before dragging and dropping (which kinda describes me in the morning, incidentally), I extracted pieces from each source. If the sources were one-shot samples, I used them as as. For the looped sources, I sometimes pulled out multiple pieces. For example, I grabbed a couple hits from the electronic toms provided by Insecta Sonic out of the looped pattern.

My own gamegerm source (as Blind Mime) was a recording I made while opening the steel door of an old freight elevator in the storage warehouse where I store the GAJOOB library. It was originally a slaughter house long ago.

Once I had all the sources loaded I assigned them to 12 open slots which comprise a K.O. II Group. The K.O. II can hold a total of 999 samples but is limited to 64MB of memory and has no SD or other storage space; although you can offload samples to external storage and load them in as needed.

You might think the machine’s 64MB threshold is limiting, and you’d be right if you didn’t create with that in mind. That’s part of the whole idea.

Anyway, more to come, including the finished track which I haven’t begun to compose because once I assigned the samples I hit play with an existing pattern loaded and had way too much fun messing with the live FX.

Here’s the finished track. It’s essentially one pattern played live. The K.O. II’s live FX are a blast to play with, obviously.

I’d like to hear what others do with this instrument (using gamegerms or not). I’ve started collection tracks for an upcoming compilation if you’d like to share: https://gajoobzine.com/projects/gajoobs-k-o-ii-collection-vol-1/ .