Korg USA Mourns the Passing of Jack Hotop, Legendary Sound Designer and Innovator

Some sad news in via Korg.

You can find posts on MATRIXSYNTH featuring Jack Hotop here for a look back on his influence in the synthesizer community. The first post was a simple pic back in 2006.

Press release from Korg follows:

Over a 40-Year Career, the Influential Synthesist and Accomplished Touring Keyboardist Shaped the Sonic Architecture of More Than 100 Landmark Instruments, Including the Historic M1 Workstation

MELVILLE, N.Y. - Korg USA announces with deep sadness the passing of longtime employee, celebrated sound designer, and musical instrument industry icon Jack Hotop. Joining Korg USA (then Unicord) in 1983, Hotop started as Senior Voicing Manager and spent over four decades driving the development, sound design, programming, voicing, and product demonstrations for more than 100 Korg products. As a pioneering engineer and exceptionally skilled performer, his extensive contributions helped guide the evolution of synthesizers and digital workstations from the early 1980s through the modern era, leaving an indelible imprint on instruments used by musicians around the world and for generations to come.

Hotop’s foundational expertise was anchored in a rigorous musical and technical background. Raised in a musical family, he began piano lessons at age seven, inspired by his father, a musician featured on several Broadway cast recordings, and numerous pianists on his mother’s side. By age 14, he was actively performing in local bands on a Gibson 101 organ. He pursued formal training at the Berklee College of Music, majoring in arranging, composition, and accompaniment, before expanding into emerging music technology at the Boston School of Electronic Music under Roger Powell. It was there that Hotop established his core synthesis fundamentals using early hardware including the ARP Odyssey, 2600, 2500, and EMS Synthi, building a deep understanding of waveforms, envelopes, low-frequency oscillators, and modulators.

His professional engineering career with Korg began following an extraordinary individual trial-and-error initiative around 1982. After buying a Korg PolySix, Hotop spent 36 consecutive hours completely reprogramming every factory voice. Looking to hot-rod and hardware-modify the instrument to add expanded preset locations, a noise generator, oscillator sync, and ring modulation, he initiated a three-hour technical phone call with a company engineer. This exchange led to an invitation to present his custom reprogrammed presets at the corporate office, resulting in an immediate employment offer. Hotop initially designed sounds for the Poly-800, later expanding his development and sound design credits to include the DW-6000, DW-8000, Poly-800MKII, DS-8, 707, M3R, 03R, and the extensive factory sampling libraries for the DSS-1 and DSM-1 samplers.

This extensive development experience culminated in Hotop’s historic role as a core member of the international team that created the legendary Korg M1, widely recognized as the world's first successful MIDI music workstation. Traveling to Japan eight times for the project, Hotop handpicked an elite voicing team consisting of Peter Schwartz, Robby Kilgore, and Ben Dowling, collaborating alongside Michele Paciulli and Athan Billias to centralize Korg’s global preset preloads. To overcome the hardware limitation of the M1 lacking a resonant filter, Hotop and his team engineered innovative workarounds by manipulating PCM samples in unusual ways and deploying digital multi-effects, including flanging, phasing, chorusing, distortion, and rotary speaker simulation. This meticulous process included historic, spontaneous sampling successes, such as capturing a pick-played dead-string bass to create the iconic M1 pick bass, and buying a market pan flute in Yokohama that became a staple factory preset.

Following the massive success of the M1, Hotop led an expanded international voicing team known as the "MPBs," incorporating John "Skippy" Lehmkuhl, Steve McNally, and Michael Geisel to design the T-series. When Korg acquired Sequential Circuits from Yamaha and established Korg R&D, Hotop split off with Lehmkuhl, Dowling, and John Bowen to develop the Wavestation, integrating vector synthesis and wave sequencing. He then collaborated with Stephen Kay, integrating Kay’s Sound Genesis libraries into the 01/W, X-series, and N-series, while personally remaining dedicated to professional-tier product lines, including the SGproX piano. This collective expertise reassembled to build the groundbreaking Trinity workstation, which reintroduced resonant filters, deployed a touchscreen interface, and incorporated physical modeling synthesis via the MOSS expansion board.

Hotop continued to define Korg's flagship architectural paradigms by contributing to the Triton workstation, shaping its internal sounds and authoring six expansion boards. This layout evolved into the KARMA Music Workstation, which swapped traditional arpeggiators for Stephen Kay’s generated effect algorithms. Hotop transitioned this framework to the OASYS, a major hardware leap using direct-integrated proprietary editors. The OASYS replaced individual expansion boards with built-in software modeling engines, including the AL-1 analog modeling engine, the CX-3 tonewheel organ modeler, the STR-1 plucked string engine, and the MOD-7 Variable Phase Modulation synthesis engine. Hotop later scaled this core framing into the M3 and M50, ultimately culminating in the flagship Kronos, where he integrated the PolySix and MS-20 engines along with premium SGX-1 and EP1 piano engines.

Beyond his technical achievements, Hotop maintained a parallel, high-profile career as an active touring keyboardist, composer, and musical director. During the 1970s and 1980s, he conducted strings and toured the world with major recording acts including The Drifters, Gloria Gaynor, and Silver Convention. He later recorded and toured extensively with Equinox, Rat Race Choir, The John Entwistle Band, Leslie West, and The Robin Zander Band. This direct experience as a touring professional deeply informed his sound design approach, ensuring that Korg’s complex, multi-engine hybrid synthesizers functioned as intuitive, real-world toolkits capable of delivering musical utility for home players, gigging musicians, and ensemble performers alike. Hotop often collaborated directly with legendary artists to shape their custom instrument palettes, working closely with industry figures such as Herbie Hancock, Keith Emerson, Joe Zawinul, and Brian Auger.

As a global clinician, webinar host, and prominent trade show presenter, Hotop was a widely recognized and beloved public face for Korg USA. For decades, his exceptional playing technique, enthusiastic product demonstrations, and educational videos at Winter NAMM and international events showcased emerging music technology to global audiences. His technical insights and artistry were featured extensively in publications such as Keyboard magazine and Electronic Musician magazine. Renowned for his deep, bonding professional relationships with engineers, programmers, and artists, Hotop was highly respected for his collaborative spirit and an enduring passion for his craft, often noting that he truly loved what he did and did what he loved.

Korg USA CEO Joe Castronovo added “Jack’s contributions to the global music products industry were transformative. His work helped shape the sound of modern music, and his legacy will continue to inspire musicians worldwide for generations. Throughout his remarkable career, Jack exemplified KORG’s guiding principle of ‘New Music Always,’ bringing together innovation, artistry, and a deep understanding of the musician’s experience in everything he created.”