Title link takes you to Part 1 of an excellent three part series by Gordon Reid on the history of Korg and its founder, Tsutomu Katoh. Part 1 starts in the early 1960s with the DoncaMatic rhythm machines and ends with the DW Series in 1986. Here are links to Part 2, Part 3. Fascinating reads if you haven't read them before.Their first synth? The Minikorg 700
Image via Sequencer.de's Korg page.
Via SOS:
"Whether by luck or genius, Katoh and his team produced something truly innovative. Taking many of the concepts from the 1970 organ prototype, they broke numerous unwritten rules that decreed that synths should have multiple oscillators, self-oscillating filters, and variable parameters for all the functions on the panel. Instead, the 700 offered oscillator settings such as 'chorus I' and 'chorus II' (which produced rich, swirling tones), and its strange percussion/singing controls created envelopes quite unlike those of the competition. But the little synth's greatest strength was its 'Traveler', a low-pass/high-pass filter section that proved to be extremely intuitive and manageable. Sure, there were limitations, but to concentrate on these was to miss the point entirely. The 700 was stable, it was affordable and, most important of all, it sounded great, eventually numbering players as respected as Kitaro and Vangelis among its users."
