Last year, Korg bundled the sounds from all of the M1’s memory cards, with those of its successor, 1990’s Wavestation, into a software synthesizer package called the Korg Legacy Collection - Digital Edition.
How Are These Sounds Created?
To understand the sounds within the M1 component of the Digital Edition of the Legacy Collection, it helps to understand how the sounds were originally created.
Rene Ceballos founded RCG:Audio before joining Cakewalk. His own synth designs, such as Z3TA+ and Rapture, build on concepts pioneered by the M1. He recently explained to me that once the sound designers of the 1980s understood that their samples were living on ROM chips, they could be layered and programmed in all sorts of unique ways, even before the musician got to them.
"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."
Article comments
1 - duane
Interesting stuff, Ed. I think Korg is currently leading the way with its Oasys. What do you say?
My bedroom studio, still taking shape, has a Yamaha S90 ES that sits there glowering at me, since I am not a keyboardist.