Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The MicroKorg is probably the finest synth you'll ever get at that price. It's very small (same size as many of those toy keyboards you grew up as a kid, but this is no toy), and has 37 keys, although the big criticisms here is Korg opted for toy keyboard-sized keys, rather than full-sized keys (the similar sized and similarly priced Alesis Micron, also 37 keys, used full-sized keys). It's a four note polyphonic virtual analog synth capable of fantastic analog sounds, with all the great sounds of the '70s, '80s, and '90s! It's essentially a Korg MS-2000 in a small package, but with an 8-band vocoder (instead of 16-band), and a superior arpeggiator, great for all you electronica and techno buffs out there, or those who want to create Tangerine Dream-like rhythms without the bulky gear that group had to use back in the glory days of the mid '70s. I've been aware of vocoders for ages, and of course, was a huge trademark in Kraftwerk's sound (they started using vocoders starting with 1973's Ralf & Florian, which is one album prior to their famous breakthrough, Autobahn), I am so happy to now personally own a vocoder, that is, one included in a synth. It has a condensor microphone for use of a vocoder, although you can hook up any standard microphone too. Like most any synth made in the last 20-25 years, it's MIDI, so you can have it interact with other MIDI synths, drum machines, your computer, or any other MIDI device.
Although it comes with an AC adapter for home and studio use, you'll be happy that you can use 6 AA batteries, so you can bring it with you on your next camping adventure (plus it has a headphone jack too, since hooking it up to speakers might be a bit difficult in the Great Outdoors).
It's also fully programmable, you can alter the sounds already included, or you can erase one of the settings and start from scratch. I really love the features you can do here. You can have it polyphonic, or monophonic for use of soloing, or retro-'70s analog sounds. It has two oscillators, you have many different choices of waveforms. You can edit the arpeggiator so you can get it to do different rhythms (it can do up to a sequence of 8 notes). I also really like the delay feature, to get that echo sound when you release the note, it really gives it a fuller sound. You can get it to pan for that wonderful stereo effect, or select a phasor. You can even program it to have the pitch wheel and modulation wheel do things, such as altering pitch, the resonance, vibrato, etc. There'e two edit knobs, and five more knobs to help you with the programming. But I very much suggest you read the instruction manual, or you might have a hard time programming it. But once you get a hang of it, you'll have a ton of fun programming your own sounds and see what you can do. Despite the keys itself, it's actually a fully professional synthesizer.
The MicroKorg might be geared for the younger audience, thanks to its low price and many of the techno sounds it can do, but Jean Michel Jarre uses one and he's hardly young. Not to mention you can make it do a lot of non-techno sounds too, like classic '70s analog sounds, or '80s polyphonic synth sounds (like what you hear on Van Halen's "Jump") so it doesn't just appeal to the young segment.
It's great see many professional musicians using it from Jean Michel Jarre right down to Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran. I even saw a documentary directed by Hans Fjellestad called Moog, which was about Robert Moog and of Moog synthesizers, and they showed several techno/electronic groups where the main emphasis was on their Moog gear (naturally), but one group was clearly shown with a MicroKorg.
This is no 88 key workstation, that's for sure. In some cases that's a good thing, especially if you like in a small apartment and you're concerned about space, but for such a small synth, I am completely blown away at what this can do. You really need to try and buy this synth, you won't be disappointed!
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Korg microKorg Analog Modeling Synthesizer with Vocoder
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