Korg M3 MULTiFORMAT

Intrinsic | 14 March 2015 | 18 GB

…: Korg M3 Synth/Sampler :..

(.NKI, .EXS, .FXP, .WAV, .SXT)

Keyboard workstations have always been something of a Korg speciality, ever since they created the concept almost 20 years ago with the M1. Does their latest offering, the M3, live up to its pedigree? About once a decade, Korg rewrite the rules for making music on affordable keyboards. In 1988, the M1 defined what we call a workstation. Nothing that it embodied was new: PCM samples, sequencing and effects had all been used in keyboards from other manufacturers, but the ‘AI’ architecture of the M1 did it more elegantly and more affordably than it had ever been done before. Then, in 1995, the Trinity introduced the combination of touchscreens, genuinely multitimbral effects, hard disk recording and digital I/O to the mainstream keyboard world. Not only was the Trinity radical in the way that it combined these technologies, but the price — as it had been for the M1 — was remarkable for such a groundbreaking product.

111Behind the scenes, both of these instruments took advantage of advances in hardware technology. The M1 was made possible by the emergence of VLSI chips and, once fabricated, these found their way into almost everything that the company made, from guitar effects units to recording workstations. Likewise, the Trinity’s hardware would have been impractical before the mid-’90s but, once the barriers had been overcome, touchscreens and multitimbral effects began to be adopted.

In 2005, the OASYS appeared. Again, this recombined existing concepts to create a groundbreaking instrument, but it was not what you would call affordable, so it didn’t really follow in the footsteps of the M1 or the Trinity. That honour belongs, perhaps, to the subject of this review, the M3, which marries a combination of OASYS-based software and innovative hardware in a radically new instrument. Korg have described the M3 as their ‘third­generation workstation’, after the M1 and the Trinity (and their respective descendants). But is this fair? Does the M3 herald the birth of a new generation, or is it the evolution of the OASYS into the mainstream of the workstation market?

INFO/REViEW/ONLY: https://mage.si/UotAZ
Korg M3 MULTiFORMAT
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