An ocean of motion: the wondrous Wavestation

Within two years of its release, Korg’s blockbuster M1 had been copiously cloned by the competition. The age of the sample-based workstation had begun, and players were already beginning to notice that sample playback synths sounded a bit… static.

Luckily for all of us, Korg had an ace up their sleeves. Leveraging vector synthesis technology gleaned from Sequential Circuits’ Prophet VS and combining it with `wavespaces’, an all-new take on wavetable playback, the new Wavestation didn’t even try to be an all-in-one solution. This was a synthesiser, pure and simple, and it sounded like nothing we’d ever heard before.

Indeed, the sound of the Wavestation was staggering. Evocative motion-filled atmospheres heaved and churned, coalescing into a symphony of timbral textures. It was as if entire soundtracks could be played from a single key press. And many composers did exactly that – the Wavestation’s presets virtually wrote the score for the 1990s.

The Wavestation’s two most significant features were the vector joystick – used for dynamically blending two or four complete patches – and wavesequences, which could be used to string countless waveforms together in a row. Wavesequencing is incredibly powerful and can be used to create everything from slowly shifting textures to exotic synthesised rhythms.

The instrument was somewhat intimidating, and sadly far too few owners bothered to program their own wavesequences, relying instead on instantly recognisable presets. However, those with the wherewithal to dive deeply into the machine were rewarded with the power to create something utterly unique.