A wonderful early digital synthesizer. With eight notes of polyphony, two oscillators per voice, a noise source, two multi-stage envelopes, a resonant filter and auto-bend, the DSS-1 has much in common with Korg's previous flagship DW-8000. But it went much further, boasting twin digital delays, oscillator sync, an improved unison mode, a lush analog VCF switchable between 12 and 24dB, and more. Whereas the DW-8000 got its raw material from 16 stored digital waves, the DSS1's oscillators take their source from sampling, additive synthesis, or even hand-drawn waveforms!

It actually had a warm sound and was great for creating pads and textures, as well as deep basses and drones. The synthesis method is based on altering various waveform samples via 2 data sliders. It can sample and then treat the samples as its waveforms - that includes all filtering and envelopes.

The DSM-1 (1987) was the expanded rackmount version.

It was used by Jean Michel Jarre, Joe Zawinul, Michael Cretu of Enigma, Mark Jenkins, Hiro Kawahara, Paul Nagle, Shriekback, and Steve Winwood.

visceralvoids

August 23, 2011 @ 6:40 pm

You can see Kevin Moore from Dream Thater use this live on the Tokyo concert video from '93 (along with the DW-8000 and a Roland JD-800.)
One of the most interesting synths in Korg history

ShorShot

August 16, 2011 @ 5:38 pm

The DSM-1 is NOT the mountrack version of the DSS-1 !! Please vintagesynth.com, fix that!

pajacke

May 30, 2011 @ 6:23 am

A few weeks ago I installed this mod into my DSS1: web.me.com/tomvirostek/DSS-1/DSS1.html
Installation is not for the faint hearted,took up a whole day and I spent twice the money for the mod than on he actual unit, but it's worth every penny.
Bright blue display, storage on CFcard/USBstick,24MB of memory (in 256kB chunks though), have all four systems off a floppy loaded at a time, but most important wav-file compatibility for transferring samples to and fro PC with the CF.
Didn't go for the SCSIinterface though, it's not needed if you got USB.
I got a new old favorite KORGsynth again

noah

May 20, 2011 @ 1:03 pm

My exhaust fell off while in kentucky, so I inched my way toward a pickers paradise looking for wire. The owner gave me some wire and the dss 1 for 20 bucks. What a great day.

jbrasher

May 3, 2011 @ 10:38 am

Of all the synths I have owned, I think for some strange reason this may be my favorite. I think I paid $150 for it with a broken disk drive. I replaced it with a chinon drive (like $5 on ebay) and it is good to go. I use Omniflop to make disks and I still haven't tried all of them out there. I haven't even touched the programming (except to make a fat simple saw) or the sampling, and I still love this thing. There is a lot of support for the DSS out there. The drive load time is a bit of a nuisance but it really isn't hard to find a bank of 32 good patches that you can use in a set.

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