Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Great sound quality and overall usefulness |
| Disadvantages: |
Few user un - friendly parts |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
No, I'm not professing my adoration for some leather-clad woman from The Matrix, neither am I becoming overly religious; I love my Korg Trinity Pro.
Imagine the scene: "Dad, I think I need something a little more up market if I am to succeed in my musical ventures." I was 16, just after my GCSEs had made my dad proud for an altogether brief moment. "I think I need a synthesiser."
So, we went to Brighton, to a music shop, the name of which escapes me, but I recall it was run by a man called Matt Hi-tech (his real name, I'm lead to believe) who'd just been on a week-long course to learn all about Korg Trinity synths. I browsed through a black and white jungle of
keyboards, synths vocoders, sequencers and samplers, LEDs flashing, LCDs displaying some rather pretentious voice names and I came across the beast. Its brushed aluminium casing gleaming in the light.
I fiddled with it for a while and fooled around with the touch-screen and was wowed by its seemingly user-friendliness.
I wanted that one. At £2000, I thought maybe I was pushing my luck, but I had worked pretty hard in my GCSEs and my father didn't even put up a fight. We conveyed this incredibly expensive item to Brighton station and I sat, captivated by its box all the way back to Hastings.
When we got back, I plugged it in - no speakers, but that is generally the idea. Keyboards suck, I had decided, synths were definitely the way forward.
I played a little and realised that I hadn't a clue how to do what I'd been doing with the keyboards - MIDI instumentation.
Not too long before we bought the synth, we bought Cubasis, the earlier version of Cubase which did not allow .wav file imports, but, what the hey, I could do that by hand in Sound Forge.
I'm now 21 and I've worked out pretty much everything on the machine and am still really impressed.
The samples are great with only a few which make you pull a funny face at what it's supposed to represent. The way in which you can manipulate the sounds is also very impressive and there is a wide range of fiddled-with sounds for the Korg Trinity series available to download on the Merrie Internette.
The synthesiser is a huge function and is set out in a way that confuses and frustrates, until you read the book, in which there is a step-by-step explanation of everything you see on the screen. “How very useful,” I hear you say, and it is. My only issue is that it’s monophonic and I’d love to be able to play poly on some of those sounds. The ability to create one’s own sounds from scratch will give you the edge above competition because you can stamp a piece of music with your own sound. See?
It even has an on board sequencer through which you can record any function on the synth. This is fantastic, because if you’ve used up its 16 channels and still want another voice in there, you can take one channel that’s not in use and change the patch it plays and carry on like that, giving you more value for money.
The number of add-ons you can purchase is astounding, and I’m still after the hard drive and flash ROM because I want to be able to use the vocoder effect. …easing us nicely into the effects.
It has more effects than a stick can be adequately shaken at, the touch-screen makes it easy to assign and alter the levels and what-have-you.
I realise I could go on for hours about its pitch bend, pressure ribbon, assignable switches, multi-timbral keys, disc drive, drum patches, and so on, but I really think I should finish up saying that whilst this model has been superseded by others of Korg’s design, this is still an amazing piece of kit and it sound stuck in the past. At the end of the day, it’s not the size of your synth that counts, but how you handle it, and if you read the masses of literate that accompanies it, you will know how to achieve the latest sound and definitely go beyond.
