When Sequential Circuits finally went belly-up, their research and development into vector synthesis was picked up at Korg. This led to the hugely successful Wavestation Synthesizer which was based on Sequential's ProphetVS. The Wavestation incorporated the 2-dimensional vector joystick of the ProphetVS which allowed the user to alter and animate sounds.

Korg added to this a second break-through form of synthesis: wave sequencing, by which short segments of sampled audio waveforms could be played one after the other and cross-faded into each other for some complex and unusual tones, pads, textures and rhythms. The Wavestation had 2MB of ROM based samples at your disposal. Programming is not exactly easy but this great digital synth is capable of lush ambient sounds and strange effects. It has the obligatory lowpass filter, though it is non-resonant and digital sounding. Also on-board are some multi-effects which are pretty nice. This synth is easily upgraded and expandable with PCM cards too.

In 1991 the Wavestation EX, also called EXK-WS, was released (pictured above). The EX added 150 more waveforms (4MB) including acoustic instruments and drums. The EX also adds 8 multi-effects including: Mod Pitch Shift-Delay, Stereo Compressor-Limiter/Gate, Vocoder, Overdrive and Distortion effects, transposable keyboard and added MIDI implementation and control. Wavestations are used by Orbital, The Future Sound of London, Genesis, Jan Hammer, Depeche Mode, Toto, Vangelis, Legendary Pink Dots, Biosphere and Sin.

John

July 2, 2012 @ 8:03 pm

After having problems reloading the voices using the snoize librarian and a basic USB midi interface cable I decided to change out the MIDI interface to my MacBook Pro. I used the E-Mu 0404 USB I/F instead. Everything worked just fine and I restored all the EX voices without any other problems. It's great to have everything back to normal.

Michael Ernst

June 30, 2012 @ 2:37 pm

Hallo,

Ich suche derzeit eine optisch gut erhaltene und technisch voll funktionsfähige
Korg Wavestation EX

Wenn ihr eine verkaufen möchtet bitte meldet euch bei mir:
michael.ernst96@yahoo.de

John

June 9, 2012 @ 8:52 am

I have a MacBook Pro and I'm using the snoize librarian and the UK sysex files. I'm still getting garbage in some of the performances even without a checksum error. I adjust the transmit speed to around 160 bytes/sec which seems to be a good setting. I bought this keyboard when it first came out (Wavestation then added EX later) and I'll never part with it. I still have the EX bank 3 card which copies to the RAM without problems. I replaced the RAM battery. This synth is still a killer.

Daniel Fletcher

June 2, 2012 @ 4:00 pm

@ Michael

If your useing PC, use an older midi librarian like "Sysex 97" (have tried it my self and loves it... It just work and work) If your useing Mac try out "snoize sysex libraria"

If you don't have the original sysex for your Wavestation EX. You can find it on the UK Korg page under support. (Here you can find extra banks for your Wavestation as well.)

Have a nice day.

Daniel Fletcher of D a z z - S y n t h
A Korg Wavestation EX lover....

michael

May 8, 2012 @ 7:06 am

I bought a WS EX in super mint condition. I really love it. The only problem is, how to get the factory sounds back to RAM1 and RAM2 memory. I fooled around with Cubase Essential 5.5.1, but I was not lucky, to transmit the sysex data or the .mid files back to WS.

Any idea?

Thanks and Greets,
Michael

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