Great job! Thank you so much for your kind words and for sharing Korg history. The popular percussive Organ 2 M1 program features the full length organ sample, and the Organ 1 program incorporates the truncated version. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to develop and create sounds for the Poly 800 1/2, DW6000/8000, DS8 and DSS1/DSM1. They were an important part of the evolution that led to the development of the M1.
Thank you Jack for all your groundbreaking work with Korg and the sounds of these wonderful instruments. It's been a pleasure for me to play them through the years and the M1 would never have been as successful without such great patches. Thanks for the clarification on the Organ sample - great information. The Poly-800 was my first synthesizer - I played it non-stop every day!
I love that through RU-vid, synth sound designers and engineers can comment on these types of things all these years later. Do you know what the sources for the M1 piano and organ sounds were?
Excellent video! And thanks to Jack for the amazing work on the M1. I'd also love to know the sources for the sound samples. Am I right in understanding that Digidesign's Turbosynth was used for some of the patches? Were the DWGS waves taken directly from the ROMs of those synths or regenerated for the higher bit-depth of the M1? I've read that Lore was a recording of a jack-in-the-box being wound up, is that the case? The burning question is - which make/model of piano is in that legendary patch?
@@junosix2453 Magic Organ was made with Turbosynth, the DWGS waveforms were generated on the DSS-1, Lore is a processed ambient recording, and the piano was an edited version from the SG-1D.
I recently found my old M1 in the attic. Made loads of songs with this in the late 80s by building a backing track in the multitrack sequencer and then transferring to my portastudio to overdub extra synth parts and add vocals. A dream workstation in its day.
I cheaply bought this keyboard from my country (approx 150 EUR), I repaired the keys that didn't work, and some buttons, disassembled it myself from head to toe, came with a pristine outer case, no scratches, brand new, I reloaded all the internal sound bank from the internet, and now I have the best selling synth of all time in my possession. Now it works like a charm, I made four instrumentals only with the onboard instruments and drums and I couldn't be happier. Thanks for the presentation video!
I bought the Korg M1 new in a music store in the 90s and sold it again around 2002. But I've been the proud owner of an M1 again for a year. Simply a very nice instrument.
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams I was wondering if this synthesizer you have has an option for changing the octaves? Some keyboards have that option, others don't.
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams Wow. The waveform setup. I was wondering if you are at all interested in doing another demo of the Korg M1, explaining some trivia facts I gave you like how the TubaFlugel sound pack from this synthesizer was used by British composer Andrew McCrorie Shand on Ragdoll shows from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, including Rosie and Jim, Tots TV, and it's most popular use was in Teletubbies.
I was at Sam Ash music in Richmond Hills Queens New York the day the KORG M1 was released. It was an absolute powerhouse and 2 years later I bought the T3 for $2400 cash out the door (you could haggle prices back then) but within a few months I was bored of it and bought a DW800, a DX7II and D50 and started programming them. I sold everything off and kept the DX7. More than 30 years later and I'm still programming the DX7 and still can't get tired of it. It's the most satisfying and rewarding synth I've ever owned
Thanks for sharing that story! Programming the DX7 is no easy task - I understand it, but it's still so hard to do. Very cool that you still use it and make your own sounds to this day with it.
Same here. Don't use it for its sounds anymore, but simply can't let it go since it was my 1st real synth. I'll never forget hearing the demo in the shop indeed…
Great job on the vid. Subscribed! I bought my M1 in ‘89. Used it for production work and live gigs for many years. Finally sold it in 2015, having saved all my sounds to SysEx files, which I was then able to load into Korg’s M1 VI for use in my DAW (as well as in their iPad app, which I’ve used live before). Even now, I *still* pull up the occasional M1 sound to use in client productions and in my own material. I bought a Korg Krome a few years ago, and I noticed many vestiges of the design of the M1’s OS under the hood. 🤓
Thanks for the great video! It took me back to a simpler time. I loved my M1, and all of my AI-era Korg workstations… I still remember experiencing the magic of the M1 for the first time at a music store. It was so inspiring.
Yeah and when I disassembled it to repair it which I did eventually I found out the lower removable covering is made of iron (that itself was what made this instrument so heavy), but it also helps close the circuit and make the synth turn on (without it there the M1 won't function).
@@johnnymorgansynthdreamsOf course, the OASYS weighs as much as a cruise ship! Lol. I do love Korg though. Quality is amazing, and those sounds. I have them on my Nautilus.... It too is built like a tank.
The M1 was a great product, revolutionary at the time and people loved it! The weakness with ROMpler type synths though is they are pretty much stuck in time, sonically. Sure, some of the patches are still useable today, but ROMplers simply have'nt adapted as well to different styles and genres as traditional Subtractive synths have. A Minimoog can sound as home in 70s prog rock, 80s pop and dance, 90s dance and hiphop right up to the latest styles to this day. Softsynths too are mostly based on the classic VCO-VCF-VCA architecture to this day.
Having owned an M1R for about a decade, I still lament having sold it. To todays standards its number of voices is somewhat low, but it sounds really great, and has some very recognizable sounds. The only real limitation I found is lack of a resonance filter
First off, I am always impressed how you find clips of the performers using the synth you are talking about.. Second, now I have to go fire mine up.. Thanks!
I think that the M1 was to Korg what the ipod was to Apple. Both of these products more or less saved the respective companies from a sad demise. Korg was even able to buy back the 40%share of the company that Yamaha had purchased in the 80s.
I remember the sudden switchover to digital, all the old analog synths were being dumped - I walked into a music shop in Dublin and there was all these analog synths being sold for the equivalent of $100, including Moogs. I bought a KORG Mono/Poly there and still have it today. Bought the M1 a few years later and I still have that. The VST version is great, too, and it comes with all the 'expansion cards' included.
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams Nice one. I remember looking at them all at the time and I couldn't believe they were being sold so cheaply - I remember wondering what they'd be worth in a few year.
@@JCox964 It's all about "horses for courses", never count anything out. Sometimes I will just listen to a track and say "this needs XYZ in here". Often it might be some cheesy retro thing, but it fits perfectly.
The M1 is one of my favorite synths. I don't use the sequencing function but there are so many great sounds that are still relevant today, and if you're a designer there are tons of great samples to get you started. It's a classic. Thanks for this great video!
Thanks Edgy - I will for sure be doing more Korg videos. A DW-8000 video is coming up as I just bought and fixed one. I love Korg as well. They are my dark tone friends!
Whilst at college in the UKin the early 90s a friend of mind shared a tape of music he'd played on the M1. It sounded incredible, while I was playing a cheap Yamaha keyboard. I was in awe of this proper synth but somehow never got to see it
I remember when this came into the wedding band scene that I was a part of. Absolute game changer. Just think of how many weddings that you attended had one on stage. Great video!
@@HenritheHorse I still love my D-50 - it just didn;t have the realistic Piano sound the M1 had at the time. I want to get a dss-1 - it's on my list for sure.
Got this in my high school, and after 30+ years I still enjoy designing interesting sounds out of its PCM and digitalized analog waveforms. Granted it's no true Analog or FM synth, but lots of time you can get close if you are good. Compared to D50, M1's acoustic instrument are more realistic, has more transient sounds(or you can isolate out the attack of PCM yourself), which can then be combined with DWGS or PCM loop to create 'synth acoustic' sounds that can only be synthesized by 8-operator FM. It takes a creative mind(not preset players) to fully explore M1's potential !
I can still remember well when the brand new M1 stood at my music dealer and I got moist eyes: what a dream of an instrument! Unfortunately too expensive for my budget as a student and so I bought a cheap Yamaha entry-level synth shortly after. I regret that to this day, should have just saved longer. :'-/
It really was. I saw a lot of bands around that time and everyone had the M1. I spent all my money on a D-50 the year before, so I wasn't able to join the party.
I loved my M1 - I used the sequencer to programme the basic tracks for an album I made in the late 90s - it was simple to programme, and worked well. The drums and multi-bass worked well, along with the brass and sax patches. A very powerful synth.
I’ve got the T3, a workstation which is not really talked about very often. But it’s my favorite digital synth. It’s also described as the “M1 on steroids” since it’s got double the memory and ROM plus a floppy disk drive and therefore not only features the well known M1 sounds but also a row of more realistic acoustic instruments in the same housing but with a bigger and higher resolution screen and some additional buttons. It was released only a year after the M1 but was quite high priced and marketed not really well.
I love the T2ex. It is a longer T3 with 1MB of sample RAM you can fill with 808 or 909 drums for example. Extra nice is they are usually cheaper than M1's, as nobody looks for them. So I bought 3 for 650€ in total.
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams The original M1 does 500€ with ease though, back then selling for 3500DM. A T2ex was 6000 DMark back in the day, you could buy a serious Mercedes for that amount of money back then, yet these do 200-250 today.
I thought that I'd died and gone to synth heaven when I first played an M1 as a 16 year old in my local music shop in 1988! It was a revelation to play through sounds that actually sounded uncannily like the acoustic instruments they were mimicking! I actually was confused as to what the M1 actually was upon seeing the words Music Workstation. It sounded like a sampler but it wasn't one! It had a built in sequencer but no floppy disk drive like the Roland D20 and Ensoniq SQ80 that were released a couple of months earlier that year. I had my heart set on an M1 and Korg DF1 extremel data filer disk drive but I actually saved the extra mula and got a Korg T3EX instead which I ended up using for over 25 years! I've had a very special affinity for Korg products ever since and I hope that the company releases a next generation product to the Kronos that won't take 3 minutes to boot up!
Thanks for the comments Mad Ness. I had a very similar experience when I first saw and played the M1. Such great times they were as technology was really opening up so many new sonic possibilities. Thanks for the Korg story!
Haha. Me too! 😅 I used to hang out for hours at the music store messing around with the sounds that were out of this world. I finally bought one and it was all worth it. Now, I use the software, and it's still out of this world. My go-to soft synth for tracking practically anything and everything. Good job KORG.
Korg always seemed to pull out the big stops every couple of years with instruments that truly revolutionised music production and performance. After the M, T and O series, they rested on their laurels a bit up until 1995 when they released the fabulous next big step up, the silver beast called the Trinity with its touch screen interface. Then in 1999 with the Triton, 2005 with the hideously expensive but phenomenally powerful Oasys, 2007 with the M3 and 2011 with the Kronos. I certainly hope that Korg don't give up on the producing hardware music production workstation keyboards and delight us yet again with a worthy Kronos successor that doesn't have a 3 minute boot up time! 😅 As for me, I've owned a stack of Korg instruments since 1991 including the T3EX, Trinity Plus, 01WFD, DW8000, DDM110, Z1EX, Wavestation AD, Wavestation SR, fully maxed out Triton Classic with MOSS board, 64mb sample ram and EXB01 and EXB02 expansions, IX300 and PA2X.
Nice mini-docu! The M1 was in my brain since 1989 high school music class. I had all the folders back then, yet the 4000 guilders it costed was keeping it a dream. Fast forward to 2018, I found one for 250€. Really love the clean design. It must have been made nearly 350000 times, as all the serial numbers seem to continue from 000001 upwards, and I happen to have #330 thousand sonthing. You could even add the T3/T2 to the sales count, as the whole Microkorg (the synth that was claimed to have detroned the M1 in sales) family differs as much as a T2 vs M1. That brings it to nearly 500000 synths with the same signature synth engine. The thing that made the M1 a game changer IMO was not the presets nor the sequencer, but the excellent drums and effects. Those really made up for the lack of analog filters, and the 2x10s reverb still sounds very Strymon Bigskyesque today.
Definitely a very classy looking synth. The buttons and rounded corners were very stylish. The closest I ever got to owning one were some samples on my EPS. Another great tribute video! Thanks!
Nice job. I wish you would have mentioned that a software version of the M1 has been available now for well over a decade. I use the iM1 on my iPad more than any other iPad synth. The sounds still hold up.
Absolutely. I have the M1 and I also bought the software version which is excellent as it has all the expansion cards included. I think KORG did a great job on it.
This is good. Amazing that despite the numbers made, finding a decent one on the 2nd hand market is still quite hard. I'm after a good M1R - they're out there but holding their prices well.
So nice to see the legacy of the M1 brought to the fore here ! Thank you! I am a proud Korg owner since 1976 (Maxi Korg), and still have these in the studio today, bought brand new back in the day. MS-20, SQ-10, Poly-Six, DW-8000, DSS-1, M3-R, Triton Extreme 76, MS-2000-B, King Korg, Kronos X- 73, and Kronos 2- 73. Every one of these were in use live though my long career on stage live until the pandemic in '20. Many thanks again for your presentation .🙂
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams Thank you sir! Guess I am a bit of a hoarder. D-50 and a CS-60 (like new) still in the stable with Korg and a hand signed (by Robert Moog) 50th anniversary Voyager, only 100 of these were produced. Sometimes it is well worth keeping these jewels around as long as you can. One day, someone else will enjoy them 😉
This was my childhood dream, actually T3 but it is basically the same. It has one of the best keybeds and certainly the best design ever. I have T3 in my studio as a controller only, now I am thinking about cutting the metal case and put the Medeli AKX10 arranger brain inside together with the touch screen, it would be a perfect arranger really.
The only gear from my gig days I've kept is a Korg 03-RW, which is a poorman rack mounted M1 with a few limitations. It still powers up and takes PCMCIA cards for extra wavetables. I also run the Legacy Collection in software now-days. The M1 was amazing, but the Roland D-70 had a better keyboard and the 03-RW was (obviously) MIDI rack gear. Great video Johnny Morgan. $0.02
'Shadow of the Beast' on the Commodore Amiga, when I realised that most of the music from that game was made using an M1 that was the synth for me. The Universe patch is all you really need.
ah the 80s - when we had new synths, new technology and new sounds every year. as opposed to the last 20 years where we've had 10,000 different analog synths with a sawtooth waveform and filter, trying to relive the 1970s.
Hey Johnny, fantastic video regarding the M1! I have sent you a tweet with a link regarding the different design of the rear/back panel of the M1. It's a nerdy, but still interesting detail that I couldn't find any information about on the internet. Greetings from Germany!
Interesting history... I'm a DX7 guy.. but my dad has an M1 and it's always been my second favorite.. I am surprised the M1 sales exceeded the DX.. I have an M3r because I was jealous of some of the sounds on the M1 but couldn't afford it! :-)
This synth feels like an exclamation point in history, when samples finally killed raw synthesized sound. Kind of sad in a way, but it was an amazing keyboard in its day. It's one of those rare instances when something could do everything, and do it well enough to be useful.
The M1 was the first brand new Synth I ever got. Comming from learning to play Organ and Piano up thru the 70's and early 80's. My first synth was a 2'nd hand DW-8000 which I absolutely loved. A world of new sounds comming from the Organs preset based analog sounds. I couldn't quite get the same warm synth sounds from the DW even the M1 had the waveforms , but I managed to exchange the DW with an EX-8000 which was used together with a Yamaha TX-802 for many years and to be frank even there are nice sounds in the DX-7 somehow I always found the DW/EX 8000 a far better and more interesting synth than the FM synths. Today I deeply regret that I later parted with the EX-8000. I skipped all the newer Korg sample based models but finally decided the T-3 was getting long in the tooth and settled on the Kronos (But still miss those warm synth sounds from the DW). Always been a Yamaha and Korg fanboi. Yamah mainly cause that was what I was braught up with during my youth with various Electones all the way from a B5 to a C55N and ultimate an FS-70. I am still hoping Korg will see the light and after the discontinuation of the Kronos, release another hybrid synths with Kronos like digital stuff but with at least some kind of analog filtering cause that was what made the DW and DSS-1 so cool instruments. Many of the sounds in the M1 origins from the DSS-1. I did try the DSS-1 once it was in stuck in my local store, but as many others I mainly wanting a large aray of good sampled factory sounds than actual trying to sample yourself which back in the 80's was practically impossible to create good multisampled sounds without having a ton of patience. The old T-3 is still stored at home and not selling it. It is need of a new display, and actually thinking of revieving it with one of those new programable wave cards available, but right now I can practically hardly see whats going on in the display with a lamp pointing on the screen. Both the M1 and T-series were groundbreaking in the start of the 90's
Awesome story mrdali67. Thanks sharing your history with Korg and Yamaha synths. I agree on the DW / EX-8000 - there is something special about them. I've never owned a Kronos, but everyone who does absolutely loves them so I'm also intrigued somewhat there, but I'm on the look for a DW-8000 for sure. I had a poly-800 as my first synth and the guy who sold it to me had the DW-8000 which at the time was out of my price range.
This is a lovely instrument! Years ago I got the VST version, then I got the iPad version in 2018, and in 2021 I found a real physical one in good condition, I sniped it off Ebay at 50-60% of the usual price.
Awesome as always. Hoping you continue with the M1’s little bro, the 01/W, which carried Korg’s legacy well into the ‘00’s, with a lot of help and ingenuity from two nerdy kids from VA Beach, Virginia 🖖🏾
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams It must seem strange to young musicians, but there was a point where sample-based instruments were different and exciting, thanks to people like Trevor Horn etc... Everything changed in the mid 90s, I guess.
This is very relevant in terms of sounds, because what's old is new again... The M1 is all over Beyonce's latest smash hit. Disclosure use it heavily. I've been hearing it a lot in pop records again too.
Excellent...excellent....please do one on the Alesis Fusion HD...that was a great workstation that didn't get its fair due (power supply and HD issues??)
@johnnymorgansynthdreams yea the fusion is a insane synth, has four sound engines. 6 op fm, subtractive, sampler and physical modeling based on wind instruments.
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams If you get chance, check out the Ensoniq VFX /VFX-SD Made much in the mould of the M1. Highly underrated and very powerful, but sadly dreadfully unreliable.
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams Absolutely, but get the later SD version if you can, more voices, lots of upgrades and the essential floppy drive. I worked for Ensoniq for a brief period and at that point had a 97% failure rate due to the keyboard scanning routine that levels the keys for aftertouch. Make sure you have the last OS and it all fires up on start and you should be OK. Fantastic beasts, but apt to be very sketchy at times. I took one out with Simple Minds and carried not one but two spares because of this.
Cool video, but I knew the iconic "Show Me Love" using the M1 Organ preset couldn't have been as early as 1990 like you mentioned. After doing a search I was shocked to see that the one most people know wasn't the original, there was a more obscure earlier version released in 1990 WITHOUT the Organ! SOOOO weird hearing that, especially considering the association with the M1, but interesting at the same time. I probably would have never known about it if not for this video haha
I know - I just found that out as well. So Crazy - The original is so different - the Organ didn't get used until the Stonebridge remix in 1993 which is when the song took off.
@@johnnymorgansynthdreams Just can’t get over how the song that put that iconic preset on the map was a remix! Lol I kinda wish I woulda stayed ignorant
Good video! "Putting it all Together": it's a shame that the portamento was not implemented and the filters are not resonant, but there must have been a reason for that.
