Those who invested the time were rewarded with sounds that were impossible to achieve elsewhere, but few did. Mind you, analogue synthesis had, at the time, been declared dead, and Korg were not alone in eschewing the resonant filter in favour of an unashamedly digital signal path.Īnother problem was that programming your own wavesequences required a lot of patience. You could fake it using an effects patch, but the voice filters themselves were little more than high-frequency shelving EQs, though there was a built-in exciter to spice things up. Yet the Wavestation was not without its shortcomings, not least being the lack of filter resonance. When Sequential called it a day, some of its boffins took up residence at Korg, bringing with them the still-viable technology of the VS, supercharged and stuffed into the Wavestation's sleek black frame. It was to the latter that the Wavestation bore the keenest resemblance, sharing with it a powerful vector synthesis technique that allowed multiple oscillators to be blended over time via the use of a joystick. The Wavestation rose from the ashes of Sequential Circuits - the company behind many a classic instrument, including the Prophet-5 and the Prophet VS vector synthesiser. Other such synths of the day were pitched as preset playback devices, but this… this was different. No nylon string guitars or grand pianos here, thank you. Sure, it was packed with samples, but in its initial version, those samples tended toward innovation rather than imitation. Released in the early 90s heyday of (often generic) sample-based hardware ROMplers, it offered a decidedly distinctive sound. The Wavestation lineup consisted of four models: the Wavestation and Wavestation EX keyboards, and the Wavestation A/D and Wavestation SR rackmount sound modules.The Wavestation is an odd one. Keyboard Magazine readers gave the Wavestation its "Hardware Innovation of the Year" award, and in 1995 Keyboard listed it as one of the "20 Instruments that Shook the World." The Wavestation's "Advanced Vector Synthesis" sound architecture resembled early vector synths such as the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS.ĭesigned as a "pure" synthesizer rather than a music workstation, it lacked an on-board song sequencer, yet the Wavestation, unlike any synthesizer prior to its release, was capable of generating complex, lush timbres and rhythmic sequences that sounded like a complete soundtrack by pressing only one key. Its primary innovation was Wave Sequencing, a method of multi-timbral sound generation in which different PCM waveform data are played successively, resulting in continuously evolving sounds. The Korg Wavestation is a vector synthesis synthesizer first produced in the early 1990s and later re-released as a software synthesizer in 2004.
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