This collection of musical toys has been floating around for some years now – appearing on the Switch, iPhone/iPad (thus recent versions of MacOS) and as a VR version. You still can’t buy a Windows Gadget – singular – but you can now buy all the included Gadgets – plural – as VST plugins for your favourite DAW. I own some Korg instruments and so was qualified for some further discounts in a Spring sale. Let’s see what I got in my Easter basket.
Obviously I wasn’t able to review the main app on my PC. I’m also not going to slavishly cover 40+ of these instruments – you can find the whole zoo listed here.
The gadgets are named after cities. That’s very cute – also a pain in the arse to remember which one is which. Sure – you can rote learn that Sydney is a Sampler. It would help if there was some general mnemonic rule – there isn’t – the cities aren’t always connected. Dublin for example is a Moog model D. I reckon you’ll soon want to annotate the ones you’ll actually use.
There’s some smaller versions of KORG’s own tools. Darwin is the name for their M1 for some obscure reason, maybe there’s a didge sample? Milpitas is the WaveStation. MontPellier is the Mono/Poly. Memphis is the MS20. Pompei is the Polysix. All are heavily distorted in appearance BUT actually provide all the function of their larger VST versions which is a good deal. Warszawa is the ELECTRIBE Wave currently sold for iOS.
Other people’s synthesisers include the Chicago – a Roland 303, the Phoenix – an Oberheim, the Chiang Mai is a bit CASIO. Other sample based instruments include Santa Anna – a rhythm guitar, London the drum machine and Marseille that kind of reminds me of the AKAI S6000.
Oh and there’s Recife that imitates the AKAI MPC. Lots more.
Some other things are there to solve limitations in the Gadget DAW – Zurich is a tape recorder that handles the missing audio tracks – it’s a bit like the audio track in the OP-1. It’s been improved in Sydney which handles longer samples with time stretching or the newer Stockholm, made by Reason Labs, that has eight REX samples available at any time.
But I have no idea what Fairbanks is supposed to be. It being ‘Hybrid’ describes the utilisation, not the content. Trying to work it out I found the downloadable documentation is a decade old … which leaves the impression that Gadget was perhaps more hopeful last century. All up you get a lot of toys in a big bag and they often are fully featured for much less than the Korg Collection. It’s a good deal if you like to gets lots of small toys. Kind of like a gachapon.