KORG LEGACY SESSION
Get to grips with the classic Japanese synths
Korg was founded in 1963 by nightclub owner Tsutomu Katoh and – we kid you not – accordion player Tadashi Osanai, with the intention of creating a drum machine. The resultant beatbox was dubbed the Doncamatic and sold reasonably well, eventually evolving into the now-legendary Minipops series of rhythm machines.
This unusual first outing is fitting for a company that has made a point of taking risks. During their first two decades, they always seemed slightly and engagingly out-of-step with American synthesiser outfits, producing oddballs like the Minikorg-700s and the hulking PS-3300 semimodular.
Yet both of these instruments would endear themselves to discerning players, with Greg Hawkes of The Cars latching on to the former and Keith Emerson, Vangelis, and none other Bob Moog singing the praises of the latter.
Even after they almost single-handedly re-defined the path of synthesis design with their massively popular M1 workstation, they continued to pump out the occasional oddity like the awesome and inspiring Wavestation and the woefully undervalued Prophecy, which had the audacity to combine physical modelling and virtual analogue synthesis with a (gasp!) monophonic keyboard brimming with performance controls.
The company keeps banging out commercial workstations like the Kronos, Kross and Krome, and simultaneously catering to the desktop crowd with their Volca line, all the while blazing new trails by bringing software versions of classics alongside entirely new designs for desktop, tablet and phones. There are even Nintendo-compatible Korg synths!
Meanwhile, they’ve helped to introduce sought-after rarities to a whole new generation of musicians with their re-issues of their own MS-20 as well as ARP’s vaunted Odyssey.
In this article, we’ll take a good look at a few of our favourite Korg synths and show you exactly what makes these instruments so intriguing and inspiring. We’ll be using Korg’s Legacy Collection plugins, but you can follow along on iOS and Reason versions as well – or, if you have ’em, even the hardware units!