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Home Multimedia Gallery Publications CD The Studio 20 Years Ago - A Look Back at the Korg M1I recently read a short announcement in Mix magazine stating that this year is the 20th anniversary of the Korg M1. There are many articles about the M1 online and on this page I have added my contribution. Here is an MP3 file of the M1 demonstration sequence. The sequence was designed to be heard in its entirety, so I have uploaded it as one file. The song titles are
There is a lot of reverb in the mixes, but internal reverb on a keyboard was a hot item then and Korg wanted the effects to be heard. I have also scanned an article about the M1 sequence here. This article appeared in the January 1989 issue of the Korg Patches magazine. In Sweetwater Sound's list of the top 25 influential products, Tom Norton (Korg USA's product training manager) was quoted as follows: "The M1 changed the face of the industry as the first all-in-one workstation with PCM drum rhythms and a sequencer. I can remember when the first M1 came into my store when I was in retail. I wrote a check for it in about ten minutes. I opened up the box, plugged it in, played the "Oh Yes" demo, everyone in the store pretty much fell on the floor, and I immediately got my checkbook. And still, just about every day I swear I can hear it on a radio or TV commercial." To this day it is still the world's best-selling synthesizer. Enjoy a glimpse of a time before the internet, MP3s, and digital audio workstations existed, and when MIDI was only five years old.
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