Korg PS 3100 - Demo 2

We are putting together some audio for a movie soundtrack.
So Paul and I are experimenting with the Korg PS 3100 today.


What's not to love about this lumbering beast of a machine.

There are 48 keys and each one has its own oscillator, filter and envelope generator.
The resonator (3 band pass filters) still astonishes me with its richness.
I really should play this more often.

The PS 3100 came out in 1977 and was one of the original polyphonic synths. Moog had the  Polymoog, Yamaha had the CS80, and Oberheim had their SEM-based  two voice, four voice and eight-voice machines.

The PS 3100 has only one VCO per voice.This sounds on paper to be a bit weak, but when you can play 48 VCOs at once this isn't really a problem in my opinion. In addition, Korg added the "Ensemble" setting which is like a chorus. This really thickens up the sound.

This is a old video of mine:



 Apart from the resonators and ensemble another really special quirk are the envelope generators.
We have the usual ADS (attack,decay,sustain) knobs, but instead of a knob for R (release) we have some switches.

We have Damped (very short), Half (0.5 sec) & Release (R = the decay knob setting).....These are envelope presets....... You don't see these very often & I kinda like these (esp the Damped... very short one).