Last update: 8 March 2022

The Mini Korgs

It was 1973, it was the middle of the night, we had half a tank of petrol, and we were all wearing sunglasses. And we were all playing Minimoogs, and ARP Odysseys. So why did the Keio ORGan company produce a little synthesiser with the most unorthodox controls imaginable, call it the MiniKORG 700, and try to convince us that it was worth buying? I don't know. But I'm glad that they did.

You Never Forget Your First Time... The Korg 700

My first encounter with a Korg 700 was in February 1974 in a town in which knocking two rocks against each other (or, preferably against somebody else) was considered musically sophisticated. Keyboards, especially synthesisers, were unknown. But I was entranced by the orphaned little Korg, sitting unloved at the back of the shop. Ignoring parental disapproval, I scraped together the £160 I needed to buy my first second-hand keyboard, and thus I satisfied my first really serious teenage craving. (Well... maybe my second craving, but this was the one that I satisfied first.)

It was only later that I discovered that my pride and joy was not considered kosher by much of the keyboard world and, even in these analogue-crazy times, it remains almost totally unsung. Yet several top players - Vangelis and Kitaro for two - cut their teeth on a Korg 700. But why? It had just a 37-note keyboard, was neither velocity nor pressure sensitive, and lacked any performance controls. And as for its programming controls... these were incredibly limited, with several vital parameters - such as the envelope and filter resonance - controlled by mere on/off toggle switches.

The answer was, of course, in The Sound. Despite its limitations, the 700 was a remarkably capable little synth. Of the three (!) pages that comprised its manual, one was devoted to thirteen patch charts that provided an excellent demonstration of the instrument's flexibility. The best of these was the 'Human Voice', and its wonderfully nasal 'aahhh' is instantly recognisable as a staple of early 1970s electronic music. Delving beyond the factory patches showed that the 700 could mimic many other analogue synths: its chorus waves captured the swirl of the earliest Rolands, and its dual filters imitated the thin tones of the first Yamahas without difficulty.

The quality and stability of the Korg oscillator was another good reason for liking the 700. For years I thought that complaints regarding the tuning drifts of other synths were the incoherent ramblings of chemically enhanced musos. Years later, when I discovered that these problems really existed, I simply wondered why no other company built synths that stayed in tune.

But perhaps the most compelling reason for buying a Korg 700 was its price. At under £350 it cost less than half the asking prices its contemporaries, the Minimoog, the ARP Odyssey, and the ARP Pro-Soloist. This gave the Korg a huge advantage, and for a year or so it was perhaps the most popular synthesiser in the world. With a 700, a long blond wig and a flowing cape, the world was at your feet!

Two Into One Will Go: The Korg 700S

Early in 1974, the blank panel to the left of the 700's keyboard vanished, and a second control panel appeared in its place. Korg called this the 'Effects Section', and it marked the evolution of the 700 into the 700S.

At £499 this was a somewhat more expensive, but altogether more powerful synthesiser. It had a second, independently tuneable oscillator, white and pink noise sources, filter modulation (which Korg called Travel Vibrato) and a 'Sustain Long' switch that multiplied the envelope times by a factor of ten. Most impressively, the Effects Section also added three modes of ring modulation. Two of these modes tracked the keyboard and were ideal for aggressive lead and bass sounds, whereas the third did not track, so each key you played produced a different timbre.

These additions hugely increased the range of sounds obtainable, and a range of complex atonal and percussive patches appeared in the manual. But, mindful that it would be useful to be able to jump between the more elaborate noises of the 700S and the simpler sounds of the original synth, Korg provided an on/off switch for the Effect Section, thus making it trivial to leap from a basic 700 sound to a more powerful 700S patch (and back again).

The Magnificent Four: The Korg 800DV

Korg hadn't finished finding ways to exploit the 700's strange architecture. Later in 1974, the company launched one of the greatest monosynths ever built. This was the Korg 800DV, which I first heard on a rainy August Bank Holiday Saturday in 1975 in Rumbelows' music department in Reading. (Don't laugh... Rumbelows was a significant music store in 1975, and the date is easy to remember: Reading Festival 1975 - 'Yes' headlined.) Store manager, Martin Lawrie (whom I met again 21 years later when he worked for Korg) was showing a customer how he could use the 800DV to play both parts of ELP's AquaTarkus simultaneously. This was synthesiser heaven!

The power of the 800DV lay in its unusual architecture. No... not the layout of its knobs and sliders, but the way in which you could create and play sounds. Notwithstanding the Volume, Key Transpose, and Repeat controls on the far right of the synth, you could take a hacksaw and horizontally cut its control panel into two equal and almost identical halves. You then had, in essence, something that sat somewhere between two Korg 700 and two Korg 700S synthesisers - one represented by the Upper half of the panel, the other by the Lower. And with two distinct synths, each replete with its own oscillator, filters, and envelope, you could create two different sounds and play them independently.

Now, before you tell me that other mid-70s Dual Voltage synths allowed you to play two notes simultaneously, instruments such as the ARP Odyssey used the same sound shaping parameters for both voices. None of the 800DV's competition could produce two completely independent patches that you could play as either a complex composite or as two completely independent synthesisers. But this was still only half the story because the 800DV's unique Key Transpose and Repeat panels offered twenty voice allocation modes that allowed you to allocate the voices in a huge variety of ways.

Key Transpose offered four modes. 'AC' was the most conventional of these, playing both Upper and Lower synthesisers together if you pressed one key, and allocating them to the highest and lowest notes if you played more. The second mode, 'BC', played only the Upper voice if you pressed one key, introducing the Lower when you pressed a second. Likewise with mode 'AD', except that the Lower voice played during monophonic passages. The most curious mode was 'BD', in which no sound was produced unless you played two notes or more simultaneously, at which time the two voices were allocated appropriately.

The Repeat panel offered five further modes, each of which could be used in tandem with any Key Transpose mode. These were: repeat the Upper voice only, repeat the Lower voice only, repeat the Upper and Lower simultaneously, repeat the Upper and Lower alternately, and execute a single shift from Upper to Lower. In retrospect, it is the fifth of these that is the most interesting. Why? Because this is the forerunner of the 'partial' based synthesis re-introduce on the Roland D50 more than a dozen years later. For example, you could set up a chiff on the Upper section, and a sustained sound on the Lower to synthesise a far more realistic flute than can be produced using a conventional monosynth. But my favourite 800DV patches were again the vocal sounds created by setting all four filters to emulate the formants produced by the human larynx. Instant Vangelis!

As you'll have gathered, I became a life-long fan of the 800DV. Over and above two 700s, it offered a generous 44-note keyboard, extra waveforms, and extra footages (including a super-deep 64'). It also had separate outputs for the Upper and Lower sections, plus independent effect sends and returns for each. With its duophonic structure, wealth of instantly grabable controls, and all manner of strange synthesis capabilities, it remains one of the most impressive, flexible and articulate synthesisers ever.

A Missed Opportunity: The Korg 770

Unfortunately, at nearly £900, the 800DV was way beyond my reach, so I persevered with my Korg 700 for another two years. Then, in 1977, I had my first encounter with a Korg 770. Released in 1975 and, therefore, getting a bit long in the tooth, it was on offer at just £399. But it sounded great and I fell in love at first twiddle. Indeed, I was ready to trade-in my 700 right away (or as soon as I had sorted out the problems of transporting both synths forty miles on the back of a Yamaha XS500).

Part of the 770's appeal was undoubtably its physical appearance: it looked like a baby Minimoog. But despite the radical redesign, the 770 retained the basic architecture that had made the 700S such a success. The twin oscillators offered 64' to 1' settings, 'chorus', noise, two types of ring modulation and, for perhaps the first time on a non-modular synth, an external signal input. The filters retained the traveler arrangement, but were now called high-pass and low-pass filters, and you could cross their cut-off frequencies without hacking bits of the controls. The filters also offered two levels of resonance, two LFO modulation depths, and both positive and negative envelope modulation. The strange attack/singing envelope generator was also retained, but this was now enhanced by three envelope modes, three trigger methods, three EG ranges, and three sustain time ranges. A complex VCO modulation section rounded things off, incorporating auto-pitchbend (with delay) and a delayed vibrato that was independent of the main LFO.

It was another impressive package of features and, although the 770 lacked the bite of most American synths, it was warm, rounded, and very controllable. Unfortunately, in 1978 (and before I bought the 770) Korg replaced their first-generation synthesisers with what was to become as extremely successful new series of instruments: the MS10 and MS20 monosynths, plus the MS50 expander and the SQ10 sequencer. I fell for the potential-laden patch sockets of the MS20, and all thoughts of buying a 770 went right out of the window. Immaturity ensured that I was blinded by the appearance rather than the sound of the new models, and I wasted my hard-earned dosh on an MS20. What a mistake that was! Sure, the MS20 had a million tricks up its programming sleeve, but for simple, powerful, and easily accessible synth sounds, it was (and still is) exactly the wrong choice.

A Happy Ending

Korg never returned to the philosophies of the 700, 700S, 770 or 800DV. In retrospect, we can see that, when they discontinued these and replaced them with the MS-series, they broke the mould that produced quirky and different little mono-synths. And that's a shame, because nobody ever put it back together again. But at least this story has a happy ending: it took me fifteen years to track down another Korg 800DV, and eighteen years to find another 770. On each occasion, they sounded as good as I remembered them... so I bought them. Fortunately, I've never felt the urge to wear long blond wigs and flowing capes so, in the end, it all worked out right.

You can find my full review of the Minikorgs in Sound On Sound magazine, April 1998.

Copyright ©1998, Gordon Reid.

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