Instead, four of these combine to create a patch, helping to explain why so many who heard the Wavestation at the time of its release assumed it featured a sequencer.
Sequences can be played forwards and backwards to add variety and, crucially, a wave sequence isn’t the preset level of a sound within the Wavestation. Better still, you could also assign a crossfade amount from one step to the next, so smooth notes, whose evolutions you’d assume were controlled by envelopes were, in fact, also wave sequences.
To program a pulsing sequence that burbles and blips from one note to the next, you needed to program the sequence one step at a time. Duration can either be set manually or, thrillingly, clocked to incoming MIDI sync so that each slice of a wave sequence is quantized to a desired external tempo. Wave sequencing allowed the user to organise PCM samples into a list and to set duration, pitch and volume for each. Purchase a secondhand original and you’ll find that the two most significant technologies at the heart of the Wavestation are wave sequencing and vector synthesis. This I can remember clearly too: putting on a pair of headphones and pressing play on the Wavestation’s first preset, Ski Jam, and being unable to believe that the synth didn’t have an internal sequencer. But waking up to the smell of an ashtray every day was worth it the Korg Wavestation was the first synth to which I became addicted. The synth reeked of cigarettes for the first few months of my ownership. If I spent every last penny of the money I’d saved, and mortgaged my next few birthdays and Christmases, that is.Īll I know about the original owner of the Korg Wavestation is that he’d clearly spent his time getting to know this sleek minimal early 1990s behemoth by chain-smoking his way through the manual. So suddenly here was a nearly new synthesizer whose full retail price was beyond my reach but whose secondhand value might – just might – be attainable.
Someone had returned this instrument, baffled by its capabilities after just two unsuccessful weeks of trying to form a meaningful musical relationship with it.
But this wasn’t quite the start you might expect. I walked into my local hi-tech music emporium in Southampton, aged 16, and there it was. I have an incredibly clear memory of the first time I encountered the Korg Wavestation.
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