The Korg NTS-1 synthesizer I preordered back in October was delivered today. I was looking forward to playing with it over break but its release date was pushed back several times. It finally arrived right at the start of the spring semester, so seriously learning how to operate the thing will have to wait until summer. I did have one night free to assemble and test the NTS-1 before classes took off.

Last time I used a DAW, it was Reaper in Windows, and that was to record electric guitar tracks a few years ago. I wasn’t in the mood to find and setup a DAW in Linux. I just wanted to program the NTS-1 using a music tracker interface, something like Klystrack.

The NTS-1 was able to connect to my Arturia Keystep through aconnect easily. It would have made sense to research existing options or fork Klystrack’s source code, but once I started wondering what it’s like to write code to talk to MIDI hardware, I ended up writing a small terminal sequencer in C++.