The MS50 was once part of my tower of KORGs – two MS20’s, the MS50 and the SQ10. I did so much with these that I ‘burned out’ and passed them on to Garry Bradbury in the late 1980s. He has recently died and I am sadly grateful to have the MS50 and SQ10 back in the fold. As you can see the MS50 is not in particularly good condition but it is working quite well. The colour was always greyer than the MS20.
Although the manual suggests patches based purely on the MS50 it’s quite clearly an expansion to the MS20, which for me is now the re-issue kit with MIDI inputs. It adds a third oscillator, a second low pass filter, two envelopes, LFO, mixer and various CV modifiers. The obvious plan is to mix the three oscillators with multiple amps and filters, but there’s more exotic paths you can try. For example use the Voltage Supply to pump the LFO voltage up to audible frequencies and then FM the oscillators with that.
Quite honestly there’s not much here that you couldn’t patch on many modern synthesisers. The MS series were teaching machines and keep things simple because they introduced concepts of synthesis in a classroom. The MS20 Kit also has added sync and FM, which were things which once needed the MS50. So it’s a rather lovely old beast but don’t think you are missing too much by not having it. It’s more – not better.
