"Many tricks were used to generate all those '7th world wonder' kind of sounds," Ceballos says. “Downpitching and looping samples such as rainstick, belltree, windchimes or cymbals and combining those with sweeps or evolving pads resulted in very attractive cyclic textures barely resembling the original.”

Steve Howell, who included several M1 samples in his own Nostalgia software synthesizer (which bundles together the sounds of a variety of older instruments) adds that a number of modern synths still use the techniques pioneered by the M1: “they sample a waveform, and they might have an arpeggio going on” — Howell hums rapidly repeating arpeggio — “and then they take that sample and loop it as short as possible. And when that’s layered over some other sounds, it creates this sort of big, expansive sound.

"The downside to it, of course, is that those arpeggiated samples will speed up and slow down as you play across the keyboard," Howell adds. That can create some intriguing polyrhythms, as these sounds react in time with more fixed rhythmic elements, such as drums and bass.

"It actually is almost quite appealing," Howell says — and he’s right. "Because then you get the homogenous, kind of polyrhythmic wash of sound, where these arpeggios are going totally unsynchronized, and they’re just whipping and floating around. And of course, they add panning to those so that they move from left to right, and doing all sorts of things."

Software Synthesizers Get Rhythmic

Those sonic techniques the M1 helped to pioneer remain popular to this day, but they’ve also been joined by more sophisticated programming that allows many of their rhythmic patches to adjust to tempo changes - and also to remain at the same speed as they’re played up and down the keyboard.

Many of the samples in the Wavestation synth recreated in the Digital Edition of Korg’s Legacy Collection (which streets for about $150) take advantage of this technology. On Korg’s software version of its Wavestation synth, each "zero patch" (the first patch in each bank) is a sort of sequenced self-contained mini-composition with numerous moving elements, and often a drum loop. Each of these patterns can be played in unison, or played separately. So it’s possible to record individual passes of each layer, allowing each element to be treated with its own individual EQ and effects.

While the Wavestation’s sounds are often more complex, the M1’s are more historically groundbreaking. When those sounds are layered together, the two synthesizers that Korg has bundled together complement each other nicely. The M1’s interface seems to make it a bit easier to find individual patches, but the Wavestation’s joystick GUI makes it fun to modify that device’s sounds.

While some of the patches in both synths that attempt to recreate actual instruments (such as the saxophone or guitar) now seem dated when compared to the astonishingly realistic samples in, say, Propellerhead’s Reason, many of the sounds that are indigenous to the two Legacy synthesizers are well worth exploring today, and are highly recommended for any home recordist’s sonic palette.