Korg PS-3300 is back
korg.co.uk
korg.co.uk
https://www.fullbucket.de/music/fb3300.html
The PS-3300 is a 3 layer synth with 49 voices where each voice has its own VCO/VCF/VCA. So you end up with 16 voices when you use 3 layers. It has microtunality and a reverb for each of the layers.
Here is a sound demo:
https://soundcloud.com/full-bucket/fr33ze?utm_source=clipboa...
Where are all those cables stored? Is the keyboard supposed to fold into the main case somehow?
Reminds me a bit of the C100 “developer terminal”: https://caligra.com/c100/ (which I just noticed is now shipping)
These sorts of "collectible clones" are pretty popular at the moment. A big part of it is nostalgia.
They say that it comes with a custom hard case to hold both the main unit and the keyboard.
Korg worked previously with David Friend of Arp and the Alan R Pearlman Foundation to reissue the Arp 2600 and Arp Odyssey. The Arp 2600 Full Size design is somewhat similar to this, although smaller, in that it comes with its own flight cases.
I have Korg's smaller still Arp 2600M reisslue and that came with a suitcase and foam inserts to hold the main unit, keyboard, patch cables and sequencer.
I get the impression that the PS-3300 is meant to be set up permanently in one place like a studio rather than being gigged.
That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ. I'll never get to own one or probably even touch one but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use.
Luckily cheap software and hardware synths can give us all a taste of what they're like.
This Korg seems more like something for museums or professional studios.
The irony is that a professional musician in most cases has less budget to buy those expensive things than someone working e.g. as a teacher or clerc.
I saw that Pete Townsend has donated his synths to a school in West London.
That includes a Yamaha GX-1 and an EMS modular. That’s some of the rarest (and largest) synths ever made and would have cost the equivalent of hundreds of thousands at that time.
Not too many muscle in the 1970s would have been able to buy a GX-1.
The comparison is more like bulldozer vs. car than BMW vs. Toyota - entirely new capabilities are unlocked
But unfortunately, it will primarily be used by rich YouTube "creators" to recreate some old Jean-Michel Jarre tracks.
Most polyphonic synths use individual chips for the main building blocks such as voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers, such as https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt. Those are simple analog circuits, but the specific designs that work for synths are not really useful for anything else, so they are a boutique and expensive (relative to complexity) chip. Using those: N chips per voice x 49 keys x 3 voices per key = 147*N expensive chips.
There are also some "whole synth on a chip" available like https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt at ~$10 each. So best case is ~$1.5k in chips alone for the core of this synth. Some other support circuits are still needed. Then $$$ for big PCBs and a big, noise-free linear power supply.
But even if we could drive the electronics costs down, that doesn't affect the per-unit cost of front panel controls, keybed, or the wood cabinet. Nor the per-unit cost of manufacturing labor, packaging, logistics. Nor the per-project cost of R&D and manufacturing tooling. All of these scale with size and complexity.
So it's no different from other specialized goods - the price gap relative to the "good enough" baseline will always be more than the performance gap suggests because the specialized version inherently sells fewer #units and cannot activate the same economies of scale.
Anyway, $11,000 for a musical instrument is not that much for a musical instrument even when it is a lot of hamburgers for a given musician.
:)
> That gives me the same feeling as a concert grand piano or installed pipe organ.
I think you might need to increase the number by an order of magnitude or more to get into the ballpark of [new] concert grand pianos and installed pipe organs.
https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8
…though it was in fact maintenance costs that did in the I.T.O., may it rest in peace…
> “It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.”
> The system is controlled by a bank of computers running software built on Linux, the open-source operating system.
> Maintenance costs are not inconsiderable.
> “Big computer mainframes don’t like to be turned off,” Carpenter says.
I am sorry to burst your bubble here, but that electronic organ is most definitely not a pipe organ. These are two completely different types of instruments.
It is perfectly fine to take a gigantic electronic organ, its manual, its accessories, and box it up and drop it into whatever "enclosure" you have booked for a concert. Because an electronic organ is not intricately intertwined with its enclosing building/room. That's a key differentiator.
You could really never design a "portable pipe organ" because it's simply unheard of. Like a square circle. A pipe organ's pipes are custom-fitted and custom-tuned to the space. "Transplanting" a pipe organ to a different space would probably be more difficult and error-prone than just creating a new opus altogether.
Donald Knuth's pipe organ, on the other hand, is a bona fide pipe organ, and very much deserves to be installed in its own custom-built room.
A church where I used to sing had a very lovely choir loft, and one of the music directors had been an aficionado of "Early Music", and he had caused the parish to install a pipe organ in that choir loft. Sadly, the pipe organ was more of a "theatre" type than a "church" type, and it was also maddeningly difficult to maintain with the variations in humidity and temperature up there. There was a larger-than life stained-glass window in the western wall, and San Diego's setting Sun did a number on us every evening.
So eventually, they superseded it with an electronic organ, and they did this by just plopping the new manual in the midst of the loft, even before they were able to hire a crane with a crew to dislodge the deprecated pipe organ. The electronic organ was fantastic, though, because there were two directors who knew how to play it, and it had all kinds of MIDI/programming features that placed it head-and-shoulders above the pipe organ's best days.
These are an unusual design, because they're an organ/synth hybrid. There's a tuneable oscillator for each pitch class, but they're divided down for the octaves. So it's more like a string synth/organ architecture than three full synth voices per key (which would be insanely expensive), but the dividers for each octave are driven by single VCOs which can be tuned manually and modulated together.
The sound is... interesting. Analog, but doesn't have the legendary reputation of other synths. Korg always made quirky little synths, and this is more of a quirky big synth. They didn't make many of the original.
The reissue is aimed at the usual Gen X/Boomer demographic who would have wanted one when they first appeared, couldn't afford one, but have the cash to burn now.
Things like this aren't for making music (anymore), but for collecting.
Noticed that for a while in triple A gaming. I get it, companies are playing safe, but I don’t want to be sold the same thing over and once again..
Edit: typo
This is intended to be a faithful recreation of a classic synth, for collectors / rich enthusiasts
There will be a few old school Brian Eno adjacent types who'll want one to make noise with ... and some talent will be requisite to avoid sounding like a bag of cats being poked with a stick.
- Look Mum No Computer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLluPQLh1xzlLcJd9CbAxE...
- Caught in Joy: https://www.youtube.com/@CaughtInJoy
They just show their stuff, and what they can do with these. No talent, just show. /s
On one hand, he's a bad example, because - at least as far as I know - he builds most of the stuff himself. So he's not showing off expensive synths he bought, which makes this kind of a category error.
On the other hand, he's a great example, because in terms of his musical output, he's a quite bland epigone of artists like Howard Jones or Thomas Dolby of the 80s. And in the playlist you linked of Wendy Carlos.
Now the thing is, I love Howard Jones, Thomas Dolby and Wendy Carlos. But they exist already. I don't need a copy. That's exactly the point I was trying to make.
I don't need yet another YouTuber recreating Axel F. on his freshly bought Jupiter-8. I want new Axel Fs!
However, he's not a sole YouTuber who imitates 80s music to put out videos. The videos are a mere side product.
He builds stuff, experiments and sets up museums[0], or even restores old cars[1]. When I first stumbled upon him, he was restoring old musical instruments in a warehouse and that place was a makeshift museum of sorts.
I believe he doesn't care if his musical output or taste doesn't meet someone's expectations, he's just being himself, and I like him being just that. Maybe he is not breaking new musical grounds, but he's thinking very outside the box while being a tonal copy of somebody else, and this is certainly something.
He would probably buy one of these, or clone it himself, just because he wants to, and this makes him the target audience of this squarely.
[0]: https://www.lookmumnocomputer.com/projects#/this-museum-is-n...
they are classics for a reason and subtractive synthesis is mostly "done", so it's more about bringing classic sound characters due to subtle differences in components / architecture back
I don't want to be sold the same music, algorithmically recreated again and again to maximise profit while circumventing copyright law.
A lot of people like analogue music. I certainly do, and I wonder if Korg are anticipating a reaction to the slop.
There are so many simple things they could do to greatly increase what these synths are capable of, but they don't.
Oh, and give me a way to wipe the memory or at least a bank of empty patches so I don't have to delete a preset every single time or make an empty patch to save over the presets or make a file of empty patches on the computer that I can copy over through midi.
I could go on, 30 years of hitting my head against the same walls. I am almost at the point of building my own synth and a bela and a pi-zero would make it pretty easy to do, but I haven't quite gotten irritated enough to do it, would rather spend that time making music.
How is there "no musical value in a polyphonic analogue synthesizer"?
There's a lot of unique music written using polyphonic analogue synths. Enough that people clearly like the sounds of subtractive synthesis. If they were only used just to playback tracks written in the 70s, 80s and 90s then they would still have value.
The growth of cheap analogue synths proves it's not just collectors that appreciated the user interface and the sound. There's a legion of people buying Bass Stations, Korgs, Moogs, Behrigners and Eurorack.
If Yamaha could reproduce a modern analogue GX-1 or CS-80 recreation I bet they would get snapped up too.
"Polyphonic analogue synth" means several independent envelope generators and VCFs.
Doing this is pointless -- it increases your synth's costs by orders of magnitude and provides no musical benefit whatsoever except make it slightly easier for piano players with no synthesizer experience to play it.
> The growth of cheap analogue synths
Yes, but literally none of them are doing analogue polyphony. The entire idea is just massively stupid and makes no sense in the 21st century.
> Yes, but literally none of them are doing analogue polyphony.
That's simply not true.
Korg Minilogue, Mililogue XD, Prologue, Behringer Pro-800, Sequential Take 5, Prophet Rev2, Prophet-10, Arturia PolyBrute 12, Oberheim OB-X8, Moog One and many more.
Polyphonic analogue synths are popular and very useful actually.
There's no point in trying to make an analogue synth that mimics the percussive nature of piano.
Synths are much closer to woodwinds.
I can't tell if this is a serious reply or not.
A quick look at Thomman would show you that they are all analogue polysynths not paraphonic mono-synths.
I think the only model from my list in short supply is the Prologue but you could swap it for a Dreadbox Nymphes if you like.
The Minilogue xd is "hybrid" only in the sense that it has an additional 3rd digital oscillator per voice but that can be turned off. It's still a true 4 voice, 2 oscillator analogue polysynth. If that's not good enough then swap it for a Behringer UB-Xa.
There's no shortage of models to choose from.
There's so much amazing music made with analogue polysynths. I don't know why anyone would ignore the work of Vangelis for instance. If you think he uses his CS-80 polysynth as a bad piano I don't know what to tell you.
Korg have made a series of original synths (and VSTs) that are nods to old tech with a lot of updated features.
The VST market in general is a bubbling mix of clonery and originality.
The reissues and clones are for people who want a specific vintage sound but can't afford the insane prices of vintage originals.
This is a recreation of a retro classic but in terms of new flagship hardware synthesizers there isn't much innovation because music synthesis because the gating factor is DSP and a well-configured modern laptop generally has more than enough power to generate just about any kind synthesized sound used in commercial musical performance. The innovation is happening in software plug-ins.
Synth hardware is generally for live performers or those who don't want to work with a MIDI keyboard connected to computer as their primary interface.