Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The KORG DS-10: A Pocket-Sized Retro-Synth

KORG DS-10

The KORG DS-10 is a new title for the Nintendo DS. It isn't a game, though - it is a faithful reproduction of the Korg MS-10 analog synthesizer.

It features six two-oscillator voices (two synths and four drums), a 16-step pattern editor and a mini song sequencer.

KORG DS-10

It also lets you patch stuff together and apply some simple effects.

KORG DS-10

The DS stylus works great as an interface - particularly when controlling the "KAOSS" pad (essentially an X/Y axis input device for interactively modifying pattern data and synthesizer parameters).

I've been meaning to code my own FM synth for a while now, and playing with the DS-10 has finally got me started. More on that to come.

Here's a video of the original MS-10:

3 comments:

  1. I would highly recommend checking out http://puredata.info/ for all your audio processing (such as http://rjdj.me/ for the iPhone). Also checkout http://Noise.io/ . Have fun.

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  2. Thanks for the links, Sander. The iPhone apps look cool. I would consider doing something like that myself, but I can't bring myself to program in Objective C...

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  3. a true gem. you can almost say it has 6 synth channels since the 4 drum tracks can be used just like the 2 synths (not quite but almost).

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