For some time I’ve followed a sensible path, weaving around the snake oil of ‘legendary’ analogue dinosaurs. And for multiple reasons – they are hideously overpriced, they’re often outclassed by newer machines, take up a lot of room, break down. I want to set a good example for young people – that Korg 700 is a complete ripoff, stop buying it.
As I get older and the knockoffs get cheaper I think it’s OK to examine copies of things that never came my way back then and might not ever visit in the future. People ARE going to buy them and I DO have some experience which can provide a metric. If it’s right for me to write about the MS50 and the MKS80 even though they’re much too expensive these days, it’s important to cover the alternatives.
RSF Kobol
You may already know Kobol was an ill-fated line of keyboards from France, assembled manually in small quantities and quickly snuffed out by bankruptcy. I’ve already reviewed the PolyKobol software. It seems worthwhile to look at Behringer’s rather inexpensive Kobol Expander facsimile.
My point of reference are the UK artists in the late 70s ‘new wave’ that picked up these European tools the way we in Australia picked up Japanese throwaways. Early Severed Heads was distinctive in part because our old tools were ‘exotic’ – but of course the sounds of the Mute Records bands were exotic to us.
I don’t like modular, I do like that the Expander has default audio flow that works from the get go. If you want to patch, that’s a bonus. By default you get the usual two oscillators to filter to amplifier flow, which sounds ‘grunge/hearty’ – not quite as brittle as the Kawai 100f, not sullen like a Moog. The Korg MS20 is more like a big fuzz pedal, all about overloaded elements. The Kobol when pushed is more ‘sparkly’ or ‘frothy’. It’s recognisably part of the sound of early Fad Gadget and Silicon Teens et. al. Vince Clark thought about buying eight of them but got a Fairlight instead!
That the oscillators sweep through different waveforms is an important part of that sound as it acts as a different kind of filter effect. Varying the waveforms when cross modulating the two oscillators creates a respectably complex, more than the usual ‘analogue’ result. Frequency modulating the filter is also distinctive – you can’t quite pick the reasons why but it’s not what you’ve heard elsewhere. It really is one of a kind and so even if you’re got a similar synthesiser like the MS20 you’ll know when you’d choose the Expander in a recording.
Here is a technical description of how the clone is created.
I don’t do video reviews – in this case I’ll pass you over to Sonic Lab to do the honours.
It would be excellent if Behringer remade the Expander 2, the sister of this unit. In the same way that the Korg MS50 expands the MS20, the second unit adds all kinds of warp and tumult to the main box. While the MS20 has been remade many times, the MS50 is still rare and expensive – the opposite of a good piece of fleacore. As for choosing the software PolyKobol, it’s definitely a relative of this hardware and you are going to get similar sounds but like most polyphonic keyboards there’s a different goal in mind and the musical result is not quite the same.
This is why Behringer exists. Use them.