Very interested to see how this shapes up. Any VS/Wavestation/SY22 users here with thoughts?
VS/Wavestation/SY22
Yeah curious of people who have gotten use out of these as well as the blofeld, old waldorf stuff, the newer modal argon 8 and asm hydrasynth…and other stuff I don’t know about yet. Been listening to a lot of Ulrich Schnauss recently and I’m really curious about the hyper-real timbres he had a lot of on the earlier stuff, that I’ve also heard browsing youtube of wavetable/virtual analog stuff.
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This is already shaping up to be the year of unapologetically digital affordable compact synths. And I have to say I quite like it.
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I’m very much on board with manufacturers revisiting/re-imagining machines from this era. The Wavestation is a wonderful synthesizer in theory (but maybe not wonderfully inspiring to program), and this new version seems to improve it in almost every way.
The Hydrasynth interface (and to a lesser extent the synthesis architecture) feels to me like an update of the Ensoniq ESQ-1. This new Wavestate definitely fits into a similar category.
Owned a Wavestation for many years.One of my fav among digital synths and Really excited about this new version!
A walk in the park if you had to deal with something like a tx81z in your life 
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It sounds great, but for me it seems like a glorified sample player, does it atleast have waveables so you can go deeper with the synthesis?
Far from being a “glorified sample player” , the innovative part was the wave sequencing and vector synthesis
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Oh yes indeed, I’ve strolled through many a 2x16 character park. My first “studio” was an Ensoniq SQ-1 Plus plugged into my older brother’s Boss SE-50 
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from the press release:
“Play up to 64 stereo voices with pristine clarity, using KORG’s proprietary anti-aliasing sample playback technology.”
the original wavestation’s aliasing is one of my favorite parts!
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Heh on a similar tip I’ve been waiting for a demo that’s free of “wow!” patches and just shows someone taking a sample of an acoustic instrument and pitching it all the way down.
I recently acquired a Kawai K4 (speaking of 2x16 chars) and that was the first thing I did with it. Glorious smudgefest.
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My main problem with the original wavestation (and other Kong synths later) is the concept of stuff like global sequences. While it seems clever at first I always fear changing something might affect a completely different sound. I hope they changed that for this one.
Also the synth engine (just simple osc, filter, amp no ws or effects) on the wavestation was not that great imho. The wavestation on the other hand sounds absolutely amazing at the core!
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that was my problem with the wavestation too. saving patches. a real pain.
Yeah, I used to play with a Wavestation at school, and later as VSTi and it seemed so cryptic, tried to tweak something a bit and the whole patch was ruined. Undo-button would do wonders.
Has there ever been a ‘perfect’ synth? Hell no. Perfection is a projection of nirvana that appeals to technologists. Folks who make music (in the broadest sense thereof) could give a shit. Get it on. Bang that imperfect gong.
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From the manual it sounds like they did change this:
The Performance, with its four Layers, is the main way of selecting, editing, and saving sounds. While you can save Programs, Wave Sequences, and Wave Sequence Lane Presets, you don’t have to do so: all data is contained in the Performance.
Similarly, when you load any of these data types into a Performance, a new copy of the data is created in the Performance. Any edits affect only the local copy inside the Performance, and not the original data. This lets you edit freely without worrying about affecting other sounds.
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Sounds perfect! Thanks for clearing that up!
I had a Wavestation A/D for a while. I really wanted to like it but I was never able to keep a mental map of all the pages in my head so navigating it always felt a bit like wandering around in a maze… and the sound had a character to it that I didn’t like.
This, however, looks great. Shame about the lack of audio inputs and loading (recording!) user samples. Maybe they’ll make a new version in a year that adds that, seems so obvious…
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A crying shame. atm it’s just a extremely powerful preset machine.
By that reasoning all analogue synths are preset machines
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The current lack of user-definable waves is certainly a pity. Though calling it a preset machine is probably a bit exagerated. I don’t think we can call analogue synths that don’t let you draw your own waveforms preset machines, can we? Also, Korg might indeed add that in the future, they do listen to user requests sometimes.
I must say that the preset sounds – as usual – completely turn me off. It sounds like everything I have always hated in 90s synths, just cleaner.
So I’d also love to hear some less marketing-oriented sounds, because apart from that, it seems like a very interesting synth.
For various reasons, I’ve been holding off from buying a keyboard synth for some years now, but if I am finally able to get a live project going again, I’ll definitely need something playable with a keyboard. Depending on the UI (the fact that it’s all potentiometers is scaring me a bit), how easy it is to program and how it really sounds this could be a candidate. I’m just a bit scared of the complexity here. The Modal Argon8 currently feels like a more limited, old-school, but less overwhelming proposition to me.
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