Korg MS-20: Beauty in tone

I've mentioned before that I have a bad habit of rebuying things.. twice... thrice... quadrice?! Ninety-nine percent of the time said item doesn't stick around for long--my gut was never wrong, it was just my memory that was failing. Well here's an exception to the rule that is worth celebrating: my third time's a charm go around with the OG Korg MS-20 MK1. 

MS-20s have always been a perma-cool and low-rent DGAF synth. Scraping and abrasive, they were the counterpoint to the Rolands and Moogs in the heyday of techno and then the indie-electro resurgence in the '00s. It's hard to believe that at one point they were commanding upwards of $3500 in the mid-aughts, but then they were the perfect synth for a leather-jacketed johnny come lately with zero synthesis experience looking for maximum on-stage poseur potential. Turn up the resonance and turn the filter and your neck to neck with the guitarist in terms of loudness. 

I was never particularly interested in that aspect. My interest in the MS series stemmed from a difference genre: jungle. A some point I got an X-911 and I was immediately smitten with the square wave and what I perceived to be "that" dead dread filter sound. Sometime later I got an MS-10 and continued to love the bass but found it too simple, and then I more or less ignored the whole series for a few years. But I couldn't deny myself when I finally stumbled across a cheap-ish MS-20 after the prices nosedived thanks to the reissue. I confirmed what I already knew, however; this was not "my" sound, and with that (and also the lack of space) we parted ways. 

Sometime more recently, in some new-parent haze, I bought another one, probably to "just check" that I hadn't made some huge mistake the first time around. The fact that I can't even remember owning, let alone selling to my now neighbor, is a clear indication of how little invested I was in that one. And then there was #3, the current one. Perhaps through a friend's encouragement and FOMO on a great price (sigh), I snagged another a few months ago and WOW, how wonderfully has the sound aged. So with that extended and rambling backstory, I'm want to talk about MS-20 tone. 

Oscillator-mixer saturation is not a new thing, it's a hallmark of the EMS Synthi, Moog modular, Minimoog, and many others since. But there's different ways to achieve this and whatever method Korg used gives a real dynamism in the tone that feels much closer to volume control on a guitar than the "thickening" effect of the Minimoog mixer. I.e., like the Synthi, this thing overdrives. Even the normally subdued and humble triangle wave obtains some meat when you have both oscillators at max. And all of this directly impacts the filter resonance, increasing it rather than reducing it a la Minimoog, and so thus creating maximum screamage, should you want.

But hey, you probably all knew that. That's why you bought the thing in the first place. But here's what I never cottoned onto until this time around: when you LOWER the oscillator volumes to ~50%, things go back to normal. The resonance is less unwieldy and takes on a more chewy Moog character. Add some portamento and I'll be danged if I can't fool you into thinking that I'm noodling away on a Moog Prodigy if you look the other way. This thing has nuance.

Then there is the interplay of the filters themselves. More than just changing the width of the bandpass, manipulating the highpass into the right position with the right amount of resonance really feels like you've got this thing going into a shitty amp. There's a solid-state sizzle to the sound that blurs the lines between filter and cheap EQ control, in the best way possible. Even more interesting things happen when you whack the LFO up to max on Osc 2 while in the XOR setting... Add some filter envelope and this yields even more washed out tonal blurring and phase changes that creates something that is more than the sum of its parameters. This thing is distinct. 

For my musical purposes, what gets me most excited is in the context of wobbly riser sounds and rude bass. Similar to what you experience when you first try a Synthi, there is an "ah ha" moment on the MS-20 where you realized that all those bubbly, saw-shaped LFO drips you know from rave records probably came from this thing. And then the mild distortion and the perfectly languid envelope shape lead to effortless drop bass sounds that just ooze "UK bass music in the last two decades" vibes. The lack of actual bass compared to the MS-10 is also a plus in my book, this thing is all amount the bolshie mids and low-mids. This thing is rude. 

Korg were apparently seeking to create something that could emulate acoustic instruments with the MS-series. Wherever they they failed on that aspect but they more than succeeded in creating a electronic tone monster, something that guitar nerds would fall over themselves to grab and make a youtube video for. For me, this MS-20 #3 is the sound I always wanted but didn't know I needed, and this one ain't going nowhere.