Korg EM1 Review

June 23, 2008 | Filed Under Review | No Comments

I dug this thing out of my closet about about 6 months ago and gave it a nice spot up front and center in the studio. Relentlessly I poured over this thing to see what it could do and to really give it a chance, but alas, it has to go. The drums by far were the stand out feature of this box; clean, strong and professional sounding. Sampled raw into my laptop they were quite well above and beyond the quality most of the samples I’ve come across without further editing. Other than that, my work flow just doesn’t mesh with it anymore. The synthesis is quite limited and the rest of it is far outclassed by Ableton Live. While you can get into some nice sounds with the fair amount of tweaking the knobs offer (such as in my previous post), the results are far less then musical and could be achieved easily with other gear. Most of the samples work best in their unedited state, and this is where the EM1 shows its age a bit. Most of the samples tend to be of the “banging house” variety, lots of pianos, organs and stabby sounds. The envelope and filter controls work better on the bass sounds, which is apt, as they are aimed at drum & bass styles.

One thing that caused me to give this a second chance was the complexity of the demo patterns. Many of them feature massively arpeggiated leads and swirling sounds. The more and more I played with it, I began to realize how misleading the demos were. While it is possible to achieve results similar to the demo patterns with the on board step sequencer, it isn’t really probable given the sheer amount of effort required; a quick search of you tube videos for EM1 demos will quickly point this out. You can also, if you are so inclined, connect any MIDI source to the EM1 and record into the step sequencer via MIDI . But, sadly, you are limited to 4×4 measures, and then have to copy and paste everything to a new pattern to continue the sequence. Afterwards you can either trigger them on the fly or chain them all in song mode for a completed work. As I said earlier this has all been outclassed by today’s software and largely rectified with the newer EMX1, which gives you a wider range of synthesis, 5 synth parts, an arpeggiator and the same drum sounds as the EM1

So what is the EM1 good for? I would recommend it if you wanted a drum machine for electronic styles or if you are starting out and on a budget. I would pair it with either an EA1, MicroKorg, Micron, K Station or something similar and sequence it with something like FruityLoops. The step sequencer in the EM1 could also be used to drive an external synth on two different parts. So in theory you could setup your songs and patterns in FLStudio, record them into the EM1 and then take it all live. You can also do that in practice as that’s exactly what I used to do about ten years ago.