KORG LEGACY COLLECTION
Aug 1, 2004 12:00 PM, BY JASON SCOTT ALEXANDER
Playing the waiting game is never fun, but waiting for Korg's new Legacy Collection soft-synth bundle and hardware controller has no doubt been torture for some musicians. You see, Korg's January 2004 announcement of a product that brings the sound and spirit of three of the company's best synth designs — the MS-20, the Polysix and the Wavestation — to the plug-in folder was a certified blessing to the many die-hard wave-sequencing and vector-synthesis junkies out there. (Believe me, I'm one of them.) And the suspense had nearly reached alarming levels. But the wait is finally over: Prepare to let the Legacy unfold.
HISTORICAL LEGACY
For those of you not familiar with these classics, the three-octave MS-20 was one of Korg's first major successful portable analog keyboard synthesizers, entering the market in 1978. This monophonic lead and bass synth was semimodular in design, having both hard-wired signal paths and a patch bay for overriding the hard-wired flow. External sound sources could be routed through the filter section, offering inexhaustible potential for sound creation. With two oscillators and aggressive-sounding multimode filters, the inexpensive MS-20 had a thick and solid sound that quickly made it a favorite purchase for keyboardists who couldn't afford the other big portable monosynth of that time, the Moog Minimoog.
A few years later, in 1981, Korg released the Polysix programmable six-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer. With a simple array of controls and single-oscillator voice structure, the Polysix was a surprisingly rich- and full-sounding instrument that offered onboard chorus, phase and ensemble effects; programmable modulation; and performance functions such as chord memory, arpeggiator and unison mode. The Polysix instantly became a worldwide hit for its distinctive string and pad sounds, giving instruments such as the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 stiff and, once again, less-expensive competition.
The Wavestation first appeared in 1990 with its new Advanced Vector Synthesis system, roughly based on the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS, whereby the user could program or manually operate a joystick to combine as many as four oscillators selected from the large onboard collection of waveforms to create a patch, as well as stack a max of eight patches to create a Multi. Additionally, the Wavestation possessed a second extremely powerful form of synthesis called Wave Sequencing, which allowed you to place cyclical and one-shot waveforms in a specific order to create rhythmic or melodic sequence patterns. Together, these two forms of synthesis paved the road for the Wavestation to become a true legend, producing instantly familiar, magical sounds that shimmered and changed timbre over time and to which there is still nothing quite comparable on the market.
PACKAGE DEAL
It's obvious that Korg wants to make its first foray into the wild shootin' match of plug-in development a pretty big deal: Straight out of the box, the Legacy Collection contains software emulations of all three aforementioned Korg keyboards, the MS-20FX and MDE-X effects units (more on those later), as well as a unique combination module, called Legacy Cell, that lets you freely combine MS-20 and Polysix along with high-quality insert and master effects to create a multisynth of sorts. The Wavestation, however, cannot run as part of the Legacy Cell at this time. Also bundled is the cutest piece of commemorative hardware that I've seen in a long time (and likely the coup de grace for anyone initially put off by the $499 price for plug-ins alone): an 84 percent scale replica of the original MS-20 — complete with fully functional knobs, keyboard, mod wheel and cool signal-patch section — that connects to your computer via USB.
The MS-20 and Polysix software synthesizers utilize Korg's proprietary new CMT (Component Modeling Technology) to more authentically replicate the sound of the original analog hardware. By precisely modeling every component of the hardware's circuitry (transistors, resistors, capacitors and so forth), the software is capable of reproducing not only the complex sound but also the character and response curve of each parameter in a way that is completely faithful to the original.
In fact, Korg has paid particularly close attention to preserving every ounce of authenticity in its soft incarnations, taking modern liberties only where absolutely appropriate or incumbent. Rather than summing up each synthesizer's oscillator or filter section into some sort of steroid-injected hybrid of the original, for example, the designers wisely chose to leave the cherished sonic side untouched and concentrated instead on expected modern amenities such as higher polyphony, MIDI Clock synchronization, more unison voices, preset banks and freely assignable external modulation for MS-20 and Polysix. The company even graciously provided a more intuitive operating system and user interface for Wavestation.
INSTALLATION
Complete installation of the Legacy Collection is a multipart procedure that, though relatively painless, takes slightly longer than necessary to complete. First, you have the option of installing the soft synths in stand-alone application form, as VST plug-ins or both on PCs whereas both stand-alone and Audio Units plug-in versions install simultaneously, regardless, on Macs.
On either platform, once installation is complete, you have to activate your software license within 10 days or risk being locked out of the software until you do. Activation is of the typical challenge-and-response variety. If your Legacy computer does not have an active Internet connection, you can obtain your license code using a different computer that does.
Additionally, the MS-20 controller requires installation of a custom Korg Native USB-MIDI driver that runs in lieu of the standard USB Audio Device driver, further requiring you to go through a rather cumbersome “search CD-ROM” process. Installation on the Mac was much more straightforward.
It should be noted that the software can be installed on Mac OS X and Windows XP systems only. All software is optimized for the Apple G4 Velocity Engine and the Intel Pentium 4 SSE2. After achieving mediocre performance results on my typical baseline test machine, a Pentium 4/1.5GHz with 256 MB of RAM, I permanently installed Legacy on a brand-new Pentium 4/3.2GHz with hyperthreading technology and 1 GB of RAM.
MS-CONGENIALITY
Looking first at the MS-20 software, I was immediately impressed by the gorgeous user interface. Korg has designed a breathtakingly clean and smartly laid out graphical representation of the original hardware. Although the software opens to a functional computer rendering of the hardware in a nonsizable main window, five buttons in the lower right are for choosing the view you wish to work in: Main, Edit, Config, Prog List or Write Program. With the exception of toggle arrows selecting presets at the bottom left of the window, there is nothing else to get in your way. The top menu bar is a simple affair, too, with only one really important tab to pay attention to: Preferences. There, you set the audio and MIDI hardware parameters, as well as Knob Mode (linear, circular, relative circular).
From the Main screen, you can perform all of the editing moves that MS-20 has to offer, including patching, though the silk-screened graphics are impossible to read. That's where the Edit view comes in. There, the front panel is magnified to legible proportions but still with the controls and patch plugs spanning to the right of the window's default view, which means that you have to drag the scroll bar at the bottom of the window. Or, as I quickly found out, simply click-dragging anywhere within the Edit screen, other than on a control knob, allows you to yank the whole thing back and forth.
Just like its hardware sibling, the MS-20 software sports two oscillators whose wave shapes can be set to triangle, saw, pulse width or noise, and saw, pulse 50 percent, pulse 10 percent or ring-mod to oscillator 1, respectively. Each can be independently coarse-tuned in steps of an octave, and oscillator 2 can be pitch-offset to oscillator 1. You can also apply frequency modulation to both oscillators as generated by the modulation generator, or EG1, a basic delay/attack/release envelope generator. The MS-20's highpass and lowpass self-oscillating resonant filters are pretty aggressive-sounding and are capable of notch and band-reject modes, which was a pretty radical enhancement to the basic lowpass-style filter found on many units of the day. The MS-20 software perfectly captures the spirit of these filters, including their unique form of screaming distortion when you push the filter Peak control.
The modulation generator has been upgraded from the original to address the modern amenities of host-application tempo control; MIDI Clock; and keyboard sync, which resets the generator at each Note On. The patch panel allows you to apply modulation to a variety of parameters while a flexible external modulation routing section allows you to assign controls such as velocity, pressure, pitch bend and the like to filter cutoffs, oscillator pulse widths, pitches and volume. Korg has also given the MS-20 software a polyphonic mode, with a total of 32 voices (depending on the host CPU), and you can assign a maximum of 16-voice unison with detune and spread functions.
Clicking on the Audio In/External In button just under the patch-bay section allows you to use MS-20's External Signal Process to process audio through the filter section. By setting the unison number to 2 or higher and adjusting Unison Spread, you can use the MS-20 software as a stereo filter. And it would seem that external signal processing is only possible when MS-20 is in stand-alone mode, but there is a work-around (more on this later).
As for the big question, the MS-20 software emulation sounds incredible and just as I remember the original: thick and abrasive, aggressively crude and rarely pretty. Curiously, it only ships with 32 factory programs, albeit top-drawer options that cover the range of acid and techno basses, leads, detuned comps, percussive sounds and effects — all, admittedly, what the MS-20 is best at. (There are, however, more sounds available at www.korguser.net.) Although powerful on its own, when you kick the MS-20 software into polyphonic mode, it becomes larger than life. A second factory bank of filter effects presets is for use with the external processing section. These include various overdrives, static filter types, filter sweeps, LFO talk, auto-wahs, LFO gates, sample-and-hold filters, attack detectors and envelope followers, as well as examples of how to hook up the control-voltage input to drive synth sounds. User sounds can be saved to and loaded from disk either as individual programs or by starting a new bank of your own.
POLY WANNA PLUG-IN?
The Polysix software shares a similar UI, with photo-realistic rendering of the instrument's front panel, as well as the same menu structure and modern enhancements as the MS-20 software. The Polysix may have been a six-voice polyphonic unit, but it was quite rudimentary in its voice structure compared to that of the MS-20. The single oscillator wave shape can be set to sawtooth, pulse width or pulse-width modulation. A single suboscillator can be set to one octave, two octaves or off, and oscillator vibrato intensity can be finely adjusted. The single filter is a standard early-model resonant lowpass with envelope intensity and keyboard tracking controls. The VCA has a -10dB to +10dB range, with selectable envelope or gate modes. A single envelope generator drives both the filter and the amp.
The internal modulation generator operates in the same fashion as that in the MS-20 software, and an external modulation section lets you select as many as two sources (such as velocity, aftertouch, pitch bend and so on) to modulate VCO pulse width, VCF cutoff, VCA gain and even the modulation generator's level itself. The built-in arpeggiator is, once again, synchable to key reset, MIDI Clock or host tempo and has a range of either full, two octaves or one octave, and it can be thrown into up, down or up/down mode with key latch on or off. It's pretty simple by today's standards but true to the original.
As with the MS-20 software, the Polysix Configuration page has provisions for setting a maximum of four external modulation controllers; a MIDI filter system allowing you to enable or disable MIDI controller changes, program changes and channel pressure; and, finally, a master tune and scale section, complete with equal temperament, pure major, pure minor and as many as 13 user-programmable tunings. In Key Assign mode, you can tell Polysix to hold note, memorize chords, play in unison mode and select as many as 16 unison voices and 32-note polyphony. Onboard analog effects include chorus, phase and ensemble, with adjustable Spread and Speed/Intensity settings. An Analog knob simulates random fluctuations in the oscillator pitch and filter cutoff for each note that is played, just like with analog hardware.
Legacy Polysix comes with two banks of programs, one containing 32 factory presets and another containing only “init” patches. The factory sounds are absolutely gorgeous. Basses are a definite strong point of Polysix, pounding out fat, resonant Minimoog fair to thick and tubby dub styles, delicious PWM square heads and ultrawide unisons.
THE ROYAL WAVE
The Wavestation hardware went through several upgrades and enhancements during the few short years of its life — from the original to the Wavestation EX, A/D and SR, adding PCM wave memory, A/D input converters and more factory program banks along the way. The Legacy Wavestation software encompasses all 484 waveforms, 55 effects, 550 performances and 385 patches of the original series, including the 32 digital oscillators, 32 digital filters, 64 envelope generators and 64 LFOs that handle all of the grunt work. The Wavestation is a monstrously deep and complex synthesizer to explain in detail, so I won't even try to here.
After being a third-party sound developer of the series for years, however, I can tell you that for all that the Wavestation had going for it sonically, it lacked severely in a stubborn bear of an interface, which barred many users from fully exploring its potential. Korg has always understood this, though, and the company has taken this opportunity to give the Wavestation a monster UI makeover. As easy as it is on the eyes, it's even easier on the nerves. The original editing structure has been preserved while giving you an excellent redesign of the graphical interface that takes advantage of the intuitive operation possible with software.
The sound of Legacy Wavestation is absolutely bang-on. I'd even go so far as to say that it sounds better than the original, because the hardware version had inferior D/A converters to those of today's computer soundcards, making the output of Legacy Wavestation noticeably brighter and cleaner-sounding. Still, it has some faults. I found the lack of an Undo button anywhere in the edit screens a bit of a bummer. When I accidentally deleted wave instances within a wave sequence and lost them for good, it reminded me that this was a major bitch of mine with the hardware version. Similarly, to assist in spotting a culprit sound during edits, I wish that wave-sequence lists — which can be as long as 255 wave elements — would highlight-scroll as they're played through. Instead, the list stays at the top until you manually scroll down.
In my experience, the CPU consumption was also pretty high: a four-note chord of the Wave Song performance ate up 5 percent of the CPU, and doing a vector pan pushed that to as high as 18 percent — on a 3.2GHz Pentium 4! Multi-instancing the plug-in will shrink your beefy CPU quickly. On the upside, Legacy Wavestation is completely compatible with SysEx files saved from Wavestation hardware. I tried importing my own custom-programmed WS-EX banks that I'd stored some 10 years ago as SysEx files on an MS-DOS floppy, and all went off without a hitch. Further, you can control the software using a MIDI-connected hardware Wavestation keyboard for those joystick movements.
SOFT CELL
Receiving these three synths on their own would have been sufficient enough to call a collection. But, no, Korg had to outdo itself by throwing in a little something called Legacy Cell. This stand-alone and plug-in software-based “combination structure” puts the entire collection over the top. It lets you use the two analog synth models in one of five different combinations (MS-20 and Polysix, two MS-20s, two Polysixes, one MS-20 or one Polysix) plus two inserts per synth and two master effects — all as a single whopping software instrument.
Somewhat akin to plugging two synthesizers into a tiny digital mixer with onboard effects, you can freely specify key and velocity layers/splits and velocity curves to switch among the combination of synthesizers. At any time, you can drop directly into a synth's native display mode for editing. For the insert and master effects, you can choose from 19 different effect algorithms that are drawn from some of Korg's best gear throughout the years; there's also a controller section in which you can assign any synth or effect parameter to one of eight rotary knobs and faders. The quality and flexibility of the insert and master effects is truly stellar, with CC control of several parameters and MIDI or application tempo sync at all times. The 127 factory effects presets showcase the best of Korg's programs, from mastering-quality 4-band EQ, exciter/enhancer, multiband limiter and compressor to overdrive, decimator, flanger, phaser, stereo/cross/multitap delays and various silky reverbs.
Together, all of these settings create a Performance Program, of which Korg has provided 256 (two banks of 128) awesome-sounding presets. The programs include more complex and layered variations of the broad sound categories represented in the independent synthesizers, as well as more spacious and surprisingly rhythmic and dynamic soundscapes, thanks to the advanced modulation possibilities of the Cell environment. Korg's team of sound designers has done a wonderful job in programming both classically authentic sounds and contemporary barn burners for today's trance and techno styles.
Previously, I noted that you cannot route external audio into the MS-20 VSTi synth, but the good news is that you can access those great filters via the kindly included MS-20FX effects plug-in. The MS-20's external signal processor will appear in the VST/Audio Units effect list within your host application so that you can input an audio signal from an audio track, an analog input or a plug-in instrument track. Additionally, the bundled MDE-X VST/Audio Units plug-in makes available all of Legacy Cell's 19 effect algorithms.
CONTROL FREAK
The MS-20 Controller, though designed specifically to work with the MS-20 software is, in fact, a USB MIDI controller, and as such can be used to control any of the other synths within the collection as a generic-mode controller keyboard — that is, the panel knobs and LEDs will not synchronize with controls onscreen, and the patch section will not be functional for them. Conversely, the controller is not required to use the MS-20 software, but it certainly makes it more fun. The Legacy Cell also closely integrates with the microKontrol MIDI controller.
Within the MS-20 software environment (or Legacy Cell with MS-20 as one of the chosen synthesizer modules), the 37-note, velocity-sensitive minikeyboard and plethora of quality-feeling knobs and patch jacks are flawlessly tracked by the software. Inserting the 10 provided ⅛-inch miniature patch cords into the controller's patch bay is not only cool in hardware form but also a hoot to watch your moves mirrored onscreen as yellow patch cords bounce and jiggle in Propellerhead Reason — esque fashion.
It's important to realize that no audio actually travels through the controller or the patch cords; it acts as an encoder only. Any references to audio inputs and outputs on the controller's front panel actually refer to the ins and outs on your computer's audio interface, and that is where connections into and out of the software must be made. The keyboard, it should also be noted, is not equipped with aftertouch, nor does it have a dedicated pitch-bend wheel. That didn't cause a problem for me, however, as I chose to use my regular master MIDI controller for playing, and the MS-20 controller for parameter edits and patching. The MS-20 software provides for a max of three MIDI control devices at a time. The MS-20 controller does sport a single control wheel (defaulted to modulation but assignable to pitch) and a tiny momentary switch that you can use as a clock signal.
HEIR TO THE THRONE
Plug-in software is practically being given away these days, and at $499, the Legacy Collection's sticker may look out of place when compared to the competition. In reality, though, it's a serious bargain. Even if you disregard the charming hardware controller, the price breaks down to less than 100 clams for each of the three soft synths, Legacy Cell and two independent high-quality effects plug-ins. Korg made a brilliant decision with the instruments it chose to be part of Legacy — all are nearly impossible to find on the used market. In its initial software outing, Korg has impressively raised the bar of the aesthetics, function, form and authenticity of plug-in sound so high that the Legacy Collection itself rightly deserves to go down in history.
Product Summary
KORG
LEGACY COLLECTION > $499
Pros: Awesome sound quality. Three killer synths and studio-quality multi-effects. Cute, limited-edition MS-20 controller.
Cons: CPU consumption can be heavy. Few factory presets for MS-20 and Polysix. Minikeys on MS-20 controller. Windows XP and Mac OS X only.
Contact: tel. (631) 390-6500; e-mail support@korgusa.com; Web www.korg.com
System Requirements
MAC: G4/800; Mac OS 10.2.6; 256 MB RAM; available USB port
PC: Pentium 4/1.5GHz; Windows XP; 256 MB RAM; available USB port
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