From wood@mail.labmed.washington.edu Mon Oct 3 11:00:44 1994 Date: 3 Oct 1994 10:14:54 U From: "Wood,Brent" To: Analogue Heaven Subject: DW8000 Hi, I recently was making enquires about the Korg DW8000. Since I was unable to find any info in your archives, I thought I would forward you the info I received so you could include it for others. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Features: - 8 note polyphony - 61 note full size keys. - Velocity sensitive, Aftertouch - Polyphonic portamento - Midi In/Out/Thru - Internal storage for 64 patches - tape storage for other voices on cassette - Stereo out, headphone jack - Portamento, Damper, program pedal ins - Built in Joystick (Mod, OSC, VCF) Sound synthesis features: Rich Analog Filters with digital control - Octave assign 16', 8', 4' - 16 waveforms + white noise - 2 Oscillators with ... Auto bend, Detune, Interval, level, etc. - Very expressive Cutoff and Resonance parameters. - Polarity switch for VCF and Envelope generator Intensity - Full VCF envelope generator ADSR with breakpoint and velocity settings. - VCA ADSR with slope and break point - Filter Mod depth for VCF - Vibrato depth for OSC - Frequency and delay parameters - Bend OSC and VCF parameters allowing you to do sweeps and bends with joystick. - Single LFO with variable waveform (tri, ramp, rev ramp, square), freq, delay goes to pitch or VCF - After touch to pitch modulation, VCF cutoff, VCA Other Stuff: - Two forms of polyphony and two unison voice settings - Incredible Built-in Arpeggiator with 1,2, and full octave ranges and octave indicator Assignable and Up/Down modes. Latch switch for hold. Speed control slider and indicator light - Omni on/off, selectable channel 1-16 receive - Built in programable digital delay FX for each preset (4 -512 ms with feedback and modulation) - Tons of tape backup, load, and verify features - Very easy to program with a combination of some sliders and buttons along with all programable features indicated right on front pannel. - Fairly sophisticated SysEx implementation for storing patches. - Dimensions: 998(W) x 338(D) x 101(H) millimeters - Weight 10.9 kg Comments: This is an incredible synth with tons of resonant chirp and plenty of buzz noise. Fully programmable and perfect for techno, ambient, EBM, industrial and other meaningless music catagories. It also has some of the greatest hammonds I've heard. Comes loaded with 64 patches including leads, basses, Rez basses, organs, pads, and assorted synth noise and sounds. The DW-8000 is capable of some pretty fat sounds. You can't double notes since it's monotimbral, but in the monophonic modes all 8 voices are used at once, each slightly detuned. That's 16 oscillators all going at once. I've used mono mode on some standard sawtooth presets with a lot of FC modulation to get some pretty wicked-sounding bass sounds. A mono preset with a medium cutoff and some portamento also does a decent job of doing some of those moog-type lead sounds. The keyboard is pretty nice... more solid feeling than a lot of the keyboards available today (not weighted of course), but a little clunky. Kind of reminds of a true organ keyboard, more than the mushy keyboards on lots of instruments. The clunkiness, of course, could depend on the condition of the thing itself. The DW8000 is a very under-rated beauty IMHO. It only has 8 voice polyphony anyway so using it in mono actually accentuates it's sounds. It has 16 waveforms vs the 2 in a Poly800 so that alone give you more to work with. you can stack the two oscillators to get fat sounds AND the best part is there are four voice settings two for polyphone and two for unison. this means you can change the sound of a patch just by hitting the voice setting buttons. To be honest I'm not sure what they actually do engineeringwsie, but switching from polyphony to Unison boosts the signal into overdrive making it much beefier (?) louder, and more harsh overall. I made a sample of a pad in unison for my bread and butter distorted thrash bass synth sound. The cool thing is the DW8000 doesn't have distortion. This patch right out of the synth beats my twiddling with synths, samplers, and external FX hands down. I can't say that about many synths I've worked with.