Vintage Synth Explorer

This thing is awesome! Worth the $50 I paid for it thats for sure. I hate most korg synths but this thing rocks. Don't listen to anyone's opinion but your own.. you can't go wrong with how little these go for.

Yes, there's lots to say about how bad this synth can be but what it does do is produce lovely creamy sounds. Different but complimentary to Roland synths of the same era.

Got a hold of an EX-800 for cheap on e-bay. The sequencer is useless and a pain in the ass, I use it regularly. Throw an arpeggiator on it from Ableton Live and the thing cranks out some awesome analogue blips. Bass and String pads are easy to program. It lacks any punch, definitely not comparable to the Juno in any way, but still awesome for being cheap analogue!

Oh gees, where to begin. Absolutely the worst synth I ever laid hands on. 8 voice sounds good at first, but then to get dual oscillator sounds it cuts polyphony to 4. It's not even true polyphonic, all 8/4 voices run through one filter. And to top that the oscillators are DIGITAL, not analogue. Thinnest sounding piece of junk. VA's and even digital synths and Workstations tromp this thing in sound. "Comparable to the Juno and in many ways better" is the biggest lie, who ever wrote that was on serious drugs or worked for Korg. More like "Comparable to the $50 Casio home keyboard and in many ways worse."

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TOSSUPS: The chorus can help, but it's one sound, on or off, and you'll get sick of it after awhile.

"Hold" mode works best with 4 voices. It sustains your notes until you hit new ones to replace the others. With 8 voices ringing all at once, it gets muddy!

Sequencer's not good for much. Best for doing a droning pad loop which you can play over, since tempo's controlled with a slider, not by BPM.

BAD: Biggest weakness is polyphony. It's got 2 oscillator banks, you can use one for 8 voices, or layer them for 4 voices. Unfortunately, for the richest sounds you need both, and 4 voices is limiting for chords.

Waveforms: it's either Square Wave, or Fake-Sawtooth-Really-a-Square-with-Extra -Harmonics, which is is kind of nasal, so you can't really get a full-on sawtooth sound.

Third problem: When you plug a cable into MIDI In, it erases some patch data. Ouch. How the heck did they ship with such an astounding bug? (Fixed on the Poly-800 MkII as far as I know.)