With that in mind, I pulled the Wavestation out of its closet, where it had been sitting, plugged in my small MIDI keyboard controller ( the original version of the M-Audio Axiom 25), hooked it up to powered speakers, and turned it on: Those videos will include music, and I thought that while there’s nothing wrong with licensing some music, why not write my own?
KORG WAVESTATION FACTORY RESET SOFTWARE
One of my plans for this year is to create a series of videos covering software development and other tech topics including security. If you’d like to hear what it sounds like, check out this video by Espen “I am the 80s” Kraft:īringing the Wavestation back to active duty Simply put, the Wavestation is a beautiful-sounding synth, and even 30 years later, it still sounds great. I’ve held onto it ever since, having taken it from Kingston to Toronto, then San Francisco during the dot-com bubble and back, and it’s now at my current home in Tampa. …and I’ve even used it for some multimedia software projects: My first software deliverable after graduating from University: A multimedia promo for family album software. …and I’ve done other live gigs with it (that’s me in the pink wig)… Stephen Skratt, me, and Karl Mohr jamming on keyboards in 1999. I bought the Wavestation from my friend, Canadian TV/film composer Stephen Skratt, back in 1993, when I was playing keyboards in a band with my schoolmates at Crazy Go Nuts University… Me, circa 1992. The Wavestation series of synths set itself from the other synths of the era by using a technology called wave sequencing, which could be described as building sounds by pasting sequences of different waveforms together, in a way similar to George Martin’s cut-and-paste approach to the calliope sounds on the Beatles’ Being for the Benefit of Mr. The Korg’s Wavestation A/D is the rack-mount version of the Korg Wavestation EX keyboard synth, which in turn is a revised and expanded model of the original Korg Wavestation. Over the years, I’ve bought and then sold or given away a number of synths, but there’s one that I kept: A Korg Wavestation A/D. Long before I became an accordion player, I was a synth player. When you know and are ok with this, you can reaaaally enjoy Wavestate.The Korg Wavestation A/D The best damned synth of 1991. It needs time to get learned, time to get lost in. I think that is why some people got disappointed with WS. It can also can be kind and take you where you want for basic but solid synth duties. This is where magic happens: it can bring you to sound places you never thought of. Like OT, you have to accept the untamed nature of WS. It feels a bit like Octatrack: spend some time to learn and manage one feature at a time before learning the next one.Īccept to get lost in samples categories.Īccept to learn some sometimes-not-so-intuitive interface design choices. When navigating through interface, samples, and mods, becomes easier, spend time only on wavesequencing.Īs WS basic synth duties are now a second nature, learning sequencing is way more pleasant. Or one 4 oscillators synth, each of them with independant amps, filters, … or 2 double oscillators synth, or… well, whatever. But as they are well organized, it becomes easy after some times noodling and getting lost.īased on this, WS can act as 4 multimbral synth controlled by midi. So you have to accept spending some time to search for the good sample as osc. One of the major difference with “traditional” synthesis is oscillators: they are samples. Most of direct control knobs are useful for synth duties: filters, amps, lfos, macros,… I was bit disappointed, but after some time decided to approach WS differently.ĭon’t even think of wavesequencing, first use this machine as a “traditional” synth. I quiclky found myself lost: sometimes I could design crazy good sounds (for my personal taste at least ), but often got overwhelmed by the massive amount of “samples”, ways to manage wavesquencing, the sometimes cumbersome interface, and so on. I would like to share my personnal feeling with Wavestate, the way I approched it first days I used it, and how I still learn to use it.Īfter spending initial first hours with binge preset listening/noodling/enjoying, I tried to use most of its features at the same time to create my own sounds.