The developer has developed a number of highly detailed emulations of Korg’s analog synthesizers in the past (check out the Tricent Mk III plugin for a more recent example), and the Fury-800 is no exception in terms of quality.
Add some dusty plate reverb to the Poly-800’s output, and you’re in 80s synthwave heaven.Īs for Full Bucket Music’s emulation of the Poly-800, it gets very close to the original. Its digitally controlled oscillators, noisy paraphonic filter, and the even more noisy pseudo-stereo chorus effect, all add up to create these wonderfully lo-fi, unstable sounds that almost sound as if they were captured from a VHS tape.
Yes, the synth is analog, but it isn’t what you’d expect from an analog synthesizer.
I wouldn’t describe it as musical or even all that useful but it certainly is weird.See also: Best FREE Synthesizer VST Pluginsīeing a big fan of the original Korg Poly-800 synthesizer myself, I’d say that its most beautiful quality is its lo-fi sound.
It’s able to do basic delays and choruses, as one would expect, but it excels at weird pitch shifting effects, which take the mkII into entirely new territory. While presets are not compatible between the two units, they sound essentially the same, except for this delay. MIDI had been updated to include sysex, and the chorus replaced with a grainy digital delay. Gone was the DX7-style detailing, replaced with a more conservative black and blue look. Funny how nostalgia works.Īfter scouring the listings for a few weeks, I ended up with not the Poly-800 that I remembered but the mkII, Korg’s moderately updated version from 1985. I found myself longing for that fantastic plastic sound, for its oh-so 80s color scheme of gray, teal and beige, and for its cumbersome programming architecture. I sold it cheap and didn’t look back.įast forward to 2016 and I was knee-deep in cheap synths from Yahoo Auctions in Japan. By the end of high school my attentions had been stolen by a used Roland S-50 sampler, which was multitimbral and could do just about anything, and by the time the Poly-800’s internal battery died and my presets disappeared I had lost interest. I took them on vacation with us to the mountains and stayed inside programming while everyone else went hiking and swimming in the pool. I remember going to their nice house in the hills and talking with the son, who seemed old and cool but was probably in university although still probably cool.Īfter a few years I picked up an Alesis MMT-8 sequencer and HR-16 drum machine, and could make actual songs. I didn’t know much about synths and wanted to learn more, so somehow my mom got me a few lessons in synthesis with the son of the keyboard player for Santana. To this day, when I listen to “Beatbox” by The Art Of Noise, I still expect to hear those wonky pitch bends and helicopter whooshes. I had a Numark mixer and used the Poly-800 to make my own remixes of songs, recording myself playing over the originals. It was there under the tree at Christmas and took me from piano lessons and endless practicing to programming patches and playing in a local garage band (we literally played in a garage). It was certainly everything my 12-year-old self wanted in 1984. (Just no sysex, but we’ll get to that later.) It has envelopes that are a tad more advanced than the usual ADSR (something that I’ve still never gotten my head around, to tell the truth), and a filter that wouldn’t be out of place in a Herman Hesse book (because it has steps, get it? Steppes? Never mind.) Throw in a chorus, chord memory, and a quick and dirty step sequencer and you have everything the budget-minded musician could need in 1983. It’s basically an arcade sound chip with a keyboard. So basically if you like chiptune sounds you’ll adore the Poly-800. The Poly-800 does square waves and sawtooth waves that sound like square waves. However, whether you actually like the sound of those 8 voices is another matter. With two DCOs you have to make due with 4 voices, but for around $800 in 1983 this was ground-breaking. Use it in single DCO mode and you get a surprisingly generous 8 voices. This is apparently due to it using a video game sound chip for its oscillators. Say what you will about Korg’s 1983 affordable poly but it has a unique sound. Would I sell it if I had to? Have done and will do again. Does it find its way into my songs alongside my other synths? Yes, it certainly does. Is it better than a CS-80? No, of course not. I have a hard time being objective because it was my first synth love but I think it sounds just fine. The Korg Poly-800 is certainly a polarizing synth.