Inside a Luxury Synth: Creating the Linux-Powered Korg OASYS
Pages: 1, 2, 3

Following the OASYS

The OASYS keyboard is just the beginning of the road. Korg has been known for extending synthesis technology across its product line; witness its MicroKorg keyboard version of its virtual analog MS2000B synth, the extensive ElecTribe and Kaoss Pad lines, or the Legacy Collection software versions of its vintage hardware. You can bet some of what's in the OASYS now will be in other Korg products later. And the OASYS itself is designed to be highly upgradable, so that you won't have to continue the cycle of buying new gear to get new sounds.

"We're intending this as a platform," says Phillips. "The main OASYS idea is when you find a new synthesis method, you don't have to build new hardware for it. On the one hand, you can have a system that's designed to work as a musical instrument, which is designed to be integrated. And on the other hand, you can add things to expand the system without changing the hardware underneath it." Unlike with a PC, you won't be downloading a half dozen new plug-ins from the Web every other day, but when Korg does decide it wants to release a mammoth new synthesis architecture, it can.

In fact, Korg has announced the first of these expansion instruments, the STR-1 Plucked String instrument, as a free software upgrade due in December. The STR-1 is a physical model of a string, using a technique called waveguide modeling. (Similar synthesis techniques are employed by the Sculpture synth in Apple Logic Pro, and in Native Instruments and Applied Acoustics software.) By accurately modeling the way a string behaves when it is "excited" (via plucking, striking, scraping, and so on), the STR-1 can realistically reproduce instruments like guitars, basses, Clavinets, harpsichords, and bells, as well as create new, imagined sounds.

One of the exciting possibilities of the STR-1 is the ability to realistically create harmonics, and even damping at harmonics, as is possible on real-world cellos, guitars, and other instruments. Flexible routing lets you layer the STR-1 with other STR-1s or other expansion instruments, and even route live audio into the engine. For more on the upgrade announcement, see Create Digital Music.

The hammer-action, 88-note OASYS, cleared for takeoff. (Click to enlarge.)

One beloved feature of the OASYS PCI platform, the SynthKit software for building your own plug-ins, isn't yet available for OASYS. That software was released unsupported for the OASYS PCI; hopefully Korg will follow suit with the OASYS. But you can certainly expect more instrument expansion from Korg. One Korg representative hinted that Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis, as popularized by instruments like Yamaha's DX-7 and software instruments like Native Instruments' FM7 and Ableton's Operator, is a strong possibility, probably launched under Korg's name, VPM. Thanks to the Open Architecture design of the OASYS, the upgrades are software-only; no new hardware is needed. If the first three synthesis methods are any indication, OASYS owners are likely to find additional expansions worth the wait.

The Luxury Synth

Korg product manager Dan Phillips has been happily steeped in OASYS technology since the beginning.

So, ultimately, why buy a Korg OASYS instead of a computer and a pile of high-end software and peripherals? For Kovarsky, it's about having the capabilities of a computer, but "without fear"—of crashing, or overloading the CPU, or running out of polyphony, or configuration, or the other details of maintaining a PC—as well as getting audio quality that's impossible with a PC alone.

For some of OASYS' high-profile celebrity users, it's about the ability to create new sounds in a reliable, road-ready rig. Herbie Hancock, always one to drool over new gear, is already taking advantage of the OASYS in performance, morphing clav sounds into elaborate wave-chained sounds, says Kovarsky.

Ask Dan Phillips, and you'll get a more specific technical answer: "We have 172 voices with probably the best real-time interpolation available today, so you can play sounds in which the high frequencies aren't attenuating, yet you get really good anti-aliasing response." Or, more plainly, he says, "I don't think you're going to find something that sounds like or functions as smoothly as the OASYS. Speaking as someone who's been working on synthesizers for 15 years, there are very few plugins that sound very good. For some sounds, you may not be able to tell the difference, and in a mix some of the differences are lost . . . but there are a lot of areas where these things fall down."

It's not that software plug-ins sound bad, necessarily, just that software must always make a trade-off between performance and sound quality. "I would say the [Korg] Legacy MS-20 is a pretty good example of a pretty good-sounding software synth," Phillips contends. "The [Way Out Ware] TimewARP 2600 is another example. But those two things have a lot in common—one of them is that that they require a whole lot of processing juice."

Since the OASYS is a relatively closed sound-production environment, it can make full use of the CPU resources available. Software running as a plug-in in an open host on top of a PC operating system has none of these advantages, and it has to be targeted to a range of computers.

Korg is aware of the price difference between OASYS and competing solutions, says Phillips. "Three guys with dime-store guitars can make pretty good music. Korg isn't saying you need to drop eight grand on a keyboard to make good music. What we are saying is to get the kind of sounds you can make on OASYS, this is what it costs. If we could do it cheaper, we would."

Even if you can't afford to buy an OASYS for your studio, it's worth trying to steal a few moments on one to see what it's like to play. It's a tremendous experience, one that may inspire the next generation of software and hardware instrument design.

"Our concern has mostly been, how do you make a really great synthesizer?" says Phillips. "We've been working on that for about 15 years."

Exploring the OASYS

Peter Kirn is a composer/musician, media artist, technologist, writer, and the editor-in-chief of Create Digital Music.

Return to digitalmedia.oreilly.com