Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Brilliant for patterns |
| Disadvantages: |
none |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
Korg EM-1 is an easy to use, self-contained unit with great sounds and tweak ability.
Anyone wanting great dance patterns to make their own music, this an excellent choice if you are a beginner, not least in the terms of the inspiration and educational value of the programs that come preloaded.
You get a self-contained system for creating dance music, using a 16-step pattern sequencer with two monophonic synth parts, eight drum parts and effects. There are 144 drum waveforms with which to create your own sounds and a 256 pattern/16-song memory. It is black, dark grey and silver with those little squidgy buttons which light up red.
What you will get with the EM-1 is the usual Editing Matrix section containing display and a large, recessed wheel, one section controlling the effects and one controlling the synth filter, a common section dealing with the synth and drum parts and at the bottom of the unit there is 16 pads for the sequencer that doubles up as a
keyboard.
A full complement of MIDI in, out thru sockets is also available, the basic unit of storage in EM-1 is the pattern and there is 256 on board, 192 of which are preloaded with sounds and sequences from Korg, the electribe EM-1 is right up to date with its selection of 192 preloaded patterns, they are contained in three banks of 64 patterns each and they are roughly categorised into five headings i.e. house/techno, drum ‘n’ bass, there is plenty of stuff to get your creative juices flowing, all of the patterns are there to be tweaked and rewritten.
It has a tone generator, which can handle 2 parts at once, i.e. a bass line and a main melody part, and can also handle 8 drum parts
The effects unit has nine effects to choose from, but it can only handle one at any one time.
Motion sequencer that can smoothly change the cut off or other parameters in an automated loop.
You can pick some patterns, which you can then edit to keep bass lines fluent throughout your song, then step by step place in right order into song mode sequencer, registering how many times you want each pattern to repeat, after all the patterns in right position you simply press record, so now you can use the cut of knobs (filter envelope, effects records), any knob movements changes the sound of your song over time whilst recording, you can also instantly mute or solo any parts of your song pattern by pattern as it is recording, in essence breaking your song down or building up. For any song you can have up to 256 patterns maximum, which is not bad at all.
The songs you can make from this are brilliant; it truly has a lot of great sounding patterns.
When completed you can save it in one of the 16 user song memory locations stored in flash ram..
Flash ram is memory for the unit, which saves your songs or patterns in memory, when your power is on or off.
The EM-1 can either be used on its own or with another workstation, to control it i.e using it as tone generator controlled by another keyboard or synth, and it works great both ways, we will be using a Korg Triton and this works excellent with it..
Basically it comes packed with pre set patterns which you can use for either a song, or patterns going into your workstation, most of the patterns that this comes with are house/techno, drum ‘n’ bass, r&b/ hip/trip hop, nu school breaks/big beat and another (disco, funk, Latin house and reggae).
EM-1 can be viewed a sound module containing two independent monosynths with full MIDI control; pan synth part 1 fully left and synth part 2 fully right and you can bring them both up on separate desk channels.
It’s a very good compact self-contained workstation for producing dance music; the sounds are amazing from this…
I would recommend to any musicians into this sort of music, it’s great..
If you haven’t much money and want this you can use it with headphones, but its highly recommended to buy a separate stereo amplifier and studio speakers for a professional set up.
Korg also have a web site for anyone wanting a peak www.Korg.co.uk, see for yourself just how good it is..
You can purchase this for around £320.00 at most good main dealerships.
