It wouldn’t be Korg if it wasn’t kind of weird.
Once upon a time Korg released a little toy called the Monotron (2010), which caused much excitement in the troops. After many digital years this gadget announced that Korg was marching boldly back into their analogue past. Which they did – with the slightly larger Volcas (2013), then the even larger mini MS20 (2013), slowly getting bigger and heavier as the plan took hold. The reissue of the odious miniKORG 700 being the moment when it all jumped the shark.
In 2016 Korg risked entirely new analogue designs in the monologue and minilogue. While these were a success, the minilogue xd and prologue re-introduced digital elements which were then followed by fully digital keys. For all the nostalgia – you can only go so far with analogue. I was never in a hurry to go back, instead waiting for fashions to cycle and prices to fall. This review comes four years after the minilogue’s debut, simply because large discounts have kicked in.
The minilogue xd is ‘analogue’ with a vengeance – so much that you have to tune the oscillators a few times on a cold morning. Behringer’s Deepmind doesn’t have that problem and it seems a bit of unnecessary theatrics. It’s as bad as my old MKS80 – which at least has senility as an excuse. Once you do get the oscillators in tune you can make all the usual noises, restricted as always by the filter which in this case is an angry little 2 pole low pass with an irritated resonator. Not nearly as odd as the Roland JD-XA, a bit more versatile. For an old geezer like me it’s all very nice but not really enough reason to suffer only 4 voices. Especially when the most exciting aspect is the digital bit.
Alongside the two analogue oscillators is a programmable MULTI ENGINE that runs third party plugins. The logue SDK is free and a few amateur oscillator designs are available on GitHub. Some are a bit clunky but all are curious and exciting (see reviews of logue SDK plugins here). Probably the best commercial ones come from Sinevibes, once known for sound design and authoring the Fantom and V-Synth Tweak books for Roland.
Korg’s Horrible old MIDI Drivers
Korg has never been very good at Windows drivers. They provide a clutch of clever tools for rearranging your MIDI ports – which seem to provide no actual solution. I gave up trying to connect my RADIAS years ago and used MIDI cables – but the minilogue xd demands a librarian and there’s no choice except an endless epic and magical enabling and disabling of ports to try get the hardware recognised. The computer saw the minilogue xd, the librarian did not. Only when I accidentally deleted Korg’s driver and was given a stern warning that ‘features will be disabled’ did the hardware show up. I see now why Roland has a driver for each and every box.
The more recent Korg digital synthesisers have their own less complex MIDI drivers, which the ‘logues really should take up.
Voices and Choices
The minilogue xd has 4 voices, so you might go for the prologue with 8 or 16. Unless – like me – you have limited shelf space. I decided on two smaller and cheaper desktop modules linked to get 8 voices. It’s a little ungainly but fits on a shelf.
Having bought the Sinevibes oscillators and effects I then had to carefully install them in the same order on both machines. This is very fiddly – I had to unpack the right versions and sort them on the computer, then drag them one at a time into the librarian software, hit transfer then pray to God that the Korg USB connection wouldn’t drop out halfway through, meaning I had to restart the librarian which forgets the order of the plugins and has to be restocked all over again. Sigh. Not smooth.
Putting it All Together.
OK so now I’ve got two units linked by a MIDI cable, holding exactly the same plugins and patches. Audio comes from both so I connect two stereo cables to the mixer. I set one module as leader and the other as follower and … it works! 8 voices. Yay!
Most sound design is done with the front panel – oscillator volumes, filter frequency, envelopes etc. – all the usual controls are right in front of you. The basic analogue patch is the very familiar left to right mix of oscillators to filter to amp and out through some quite nice effects. Actually in my case two sets of four voices are through parallel effects. This is probably slightly different but not noticeable.
For grander plans you’ll need to learn some button combinations. For example: LFO destinations are set by pressing EDIT MODE until you see PROGRAM EDIT on the screen. Then push button number 7 in the row at the bottom to select the destination. It doesn’t help that the buttons are unlabelled – you could use DYMO labelling but most likely just pin a paper chart up near the synth. Not smooth.
The digital oscillators are switched with the noise or a simple FM voice. Toggle a lever to select one of your installed plugins and you have just one knob to wiggle. Other settings are made through the EDIT MODE and the unlabelled buttons. When you get used to the layout it’s not too bad. Your plugin effects have two knobs to twiddle.
The Sinevibes plugins offer a variety of methods but quickly evidence two main kinds of sound. There are (a) clangorous FM kinds of sounds which complement the analogue voices. Then you get (b) wobbly and super saw-like sounds which are richer than the analogue voices. That’s based only after a quick run through not years of experience – but I think that’s your basic plan of action.
Is it worth it?
This paragraph might change over time – but … it depends on how deep you want to go. If you are most interested in complex patching of modular bits and pieces then go for the opsix – it’s going to give you much more of everything to play with. There’s also Arturia’s MiniFreak, which has more elaborate modules to connect up in pairs. Neither allow you to design and install your own DSP inventions, but how many of us can even find stuff on GitHub?
If you are really keen on simple analogue synthesis something like the DeepMind is going to come in at a good price point. Other things are more expensive but maybe clearer to use. But if you are looking for both analogue and digital in the same box or have a long term relationship with Korg it’s a not too expensive way to have an 8 voice polyphonic Korg analogue to sit near your MS rig.