COMMENTS ARE GETTING BORING AND ARE CLOSED. DO WHAT THOU WILLST,
There was a time slightly after the dinosaurs that I owned a small wall of KORG. There was two MS20’s, an MS50, a SQ10 and a billion of those short patch cables. And you know, it was pretty grand for 1980 something. For 2013, it’s… well… gee what a nice watch, does it tell the time?
BLOODY patch cables and GARFIELD is the producer – “needs more obesity”.
But here we go again with a reissue of Old and Safe for the New Conservatives. Already been asked if I am going to buy a new midget MS20. I bought a MiniNova instead – maybe I made the wrong choice. Let’s be scientific about this:
Patch Management
MiniNova: there’s four banks of 256 patches which can be sorted into categories and saved back to a patch librarian over a USB connection.
KORG MS20: photocopy pages from the manual and draw the approximate positions of the knobs with a pencil.
Advantage: KORG for being legendary and analogue.
Voicing
MiniNova: three oscillators per voice with a variety of traditional, digital and wave table forms. Each oscillator can detune with itself for ‘supersaw’ effects and has a self-sync to create harmonics. 18 voices available.
KORG MS20: two oscillators, mono.
Advantage: KORG for being even more legendary and analogue.
Filters
MiniNova: two filters 12/24 hi/low/peak which can be combined with control of peak and resonance width.
KORG MS20: hi/low.
Advantage: KORG for being surrounded by candles and photographed in the dark.
Effects
MiniNova: five effect units patchable in a variety of configurations.
KORG MS20: falls out of tune as it warms up.
Advantage: KORG because – man, the late seventies are funky know what I mean.
No candles supplied.
Signal Processing
MiniNova: Balanced microphone and line inputs with vocoding, pitch effects and flow through the synthesis and effect chain.
KORG MS20: line input that feeds into a pitch detection thing that kind of sounds like an alien mouth organ.
Advantage: do you have to ask?
Arp and Sequencing
MiniNova: Arp and rhythmic ‘gator’ with selection buttons on the front panel.
KORG MS20: nothing. Buy the mini SQ-10 someday.
Advantage: simplicity at its finest.
Patching
MiniNova: 20 internal modulation paths each with two sources. Six ADSR generators, three LFOs with multiple waveforms including tempo locked patterns.
KORG MS20: three (*@&$(*$&@ patch cables.
Advantage: haptic physical interface with gravity assisted orientation DIY logistics.
Well the science is in but I don’t know. I keep reading the articles and hearing the talk and wondering if people use this stuff for making music. Or does it go next to the “Christmas Tree”? You know, that elaborate, expensive modular system that people build to look fantastic but sounds like a Roland preset that goes bwooooouuuw?
By any reasonable measure, this is a stupid way to make a bloooop noise.
No, I am not buying an MS20.
STOP PRESS — OUR CORRESPONDENT IN BIRMINGHAM HAS SENT THIS UPDATE
NOW BACK TO OUR NORMAL PROGRAMMING