Korg R3

One of the most popular synths of this sort is the MicroKorg (reviewed Dec. ’02), embraced by players and DJs alike for its solid virtual analog sound and built-in vocoder. At a glance, the new R3 looks like a beefed-up MicroKorg with full-size keys. On the inside, it’s a scaled-down Radias performance synth (reviewed Aug. ’06). If your yen to play is stronger than your dollar, is it the best of the affordable subcompacts?

OVERVIEW

The R3 is sleek and compact, housed is a lightweight plastic chassis of dark metallic brown, with a silver rear panel. Korg’s policy is that performance keyboards like the R3 use traditional pitchbend and modulation wheels, while workstations such as the Triton and M3 have a joystick. Good call — I prefer wheels, if only because it’s simpler to apply modulation and leave it on. The wheels on the R3 are a bit small, however, and may take a little getting used to if your fingers are used to those found on most five-octave synths.

The panel layout is reminiscent of the MicroKorg, chiefly because of the large knob that selects sound categories, but more elegant. An XLR input jack on top of the R3 can accept the included gooseneck mic (intended for use with the built-in vocoder), or a dynamic mic of your choice. Both it and the rear-panel audio inputs have gain knobs, and the R3 lets you process external audio through its synth engine by setting “audio in” as the waveform type for oscillator 1.

The right side of the panel is where things get exciting. The Page Select knob, which is right beneath the primary LCD display, navigates through 46 pages of tweakable parameters for the four edit knobs to its right, each of which has its own LCD display to show what you’re tweaking. The LED rings around each edit knob are more than mere eye candy: They indicate the current stored value of the selected parameter. If the knob is set all the way down to zero, the light is red, all other values mean it’s a bright yellow-green. This is an excellent feature, and is downright essential when dealing with multi-function knobs.

SOUND STRUCTURE

The R3’s 128 factory programs are divided into categories that include Motion, Pad/Strings, Lead, Bass, Vintage Bass, Vintage Lead, Vintage Poly, and presets for the formant motion feature of the built-in vocoder (see “Vocoder” at right). You can overwrite any of the 128 preset programs, and save your faves in a favorites bank.

Each program consists of up to two timbres. Each timbre is a self-contained, two-oscillator synth, and they share eight voices of polyphony. These are dynamically allocated, meaning that however many voices are not in use by one timbre in a split or layer is available to the other. The structure itself follows the familiar analog-style chain: You start with the oscillators, which are then mixed together, fed into the filter and amplifier, modulated by two LFOs, routed to insert effects, then to a master effect, and out into the world.

I simplify here, but it gets deeper. Multiple Modeling Technology (MMT) is Korg’s umbrella term for several things the oscillators do in addition to the requisite virtual analog waves, hard sync, and ability to cross-modulate the first oscillator with the second. For starters, there are Korg’s DWGS waves (see “Jargon Jockey” on page 64). Oscillator 1’s “mod” parameter lets you do simple FM, or continuously vary the selected waveform’s shape. Even more impressive here is a unison mode that makes oscillator 1 sound like five stacked, detunable oscillators, with no extra polyphony cost. This is different from the usual keyboard unison mode (which the R3 also has) that stacks voices. Visit www.keyboardmag.com/1007118 for examples of what MMT can sound like.

The Drive/Waveshaper can go from adding a little grit to creating a sub-oscillator to far more tonally complex ways of mangling the sound. For Minimoog fans who crave that three-oscillator sound, the R3 can approximate it with this feature. Keeping in mind that both dual-oscillator timbres in a program have their own Drive/Waveshaper, you can create some filthy-huge stacked sounds. Vintage aficionados will also love the analog drift function, which introduces random pitch changes in the oscillators, and the virtual patching, which is a modulation matrix that lets you route MIDI controllers, LFOs, and envelope generators to destinations of your choice. The R3 also contains a modulation sequencer. This is like a step sequencer, but records controllers instead of notes — you can program sequences of changes to filter settings, envelopes, and other parameters you choose, and you get a separate “track” for each timbre.

VOCODER

A vocoder produces those “talking synth” or “robot voice” sounds we know and love from ’80s new wave and synth rock, and it does this by using external audio (usually your voice) as a modulation source for a carrier signal, which is most often a waveform from a synth. The R3’s vocoder has 16 frequency bands, and lets you follow the usual conventions or expand on them — you can simply speak or sing into the gooseneck mic as you play a synth sound on the R3, which uses timbre 1 as the carrier, or add in audio input 2 from the rear panel as the carrier. This means that the R3 can work as a standalone vocoder, letting you superimpose syllables onto external sources such as a guitar, other synth, or pre-recorded audio.

While that’s great for experimenting in the studio, the R3 vocoder’s most gig-worthy feature is what Korg calls formant motion recording. Introduced on the Radias, it works in the same way here: You can record up to 16 “data sets” (vocal phrases), each up to seven and a half seconds long, then save them for later use. At the gig, you can then just play the keys, and the synth sound will “sing” the phrase that’s saved as part of the current program, without you having to speak into the mic. Under the hood, what’s going on is a lot like recording your voice into a sampler, except instead of playing it back unadorned, the R3 uses the stored vocal phrase as a modulator signal. Slick, and until now, unheard of at this price.

Unlike with a conventional sampler, the one thing you can’t do is somehow map different stored phrases to different keys within the same program. Formant motion programs have their own notch on the R3’s big dial, and each program can use one data set at a time.

IN USE

Being a fan of analog synths, my first instinct with the R3 was to see how long it would take for me to simplify a sound, i.e., to take off the effects, remove all the swirling bells and whistles, and rebuild my tone from there. When editing a sound on the R3, you can either work from an existing program, or start from scratch with an initialized one. If you know your way around basic synthesis concepts, you can easily get a good lead sound happening with a few seconds of knob tweaking on a real analog synth, or on virtual ones with tons of knobs, such as like the Clavia Nord Lead series or Novation K-Station. With the R3, I needed marginally more time — a few minutes — due to having four edit knobs with many pages of functions instead of “one knob per function” or close to it. Keep in mind though, that it would have taken me longer still to get to the same goal on a menu-heavy workstation keyboard. It helps that the R3’s Page Select knob calls up foursomes of things you’re likely to edit at the same time: major filter settings, envelopes with attack, decay, sustain, and release, and similarly sensible groupings.

If you’re familiar with the Radias, the R3 has an almost-identical sonic character, albeit without the Radias’ extra sampled waveforms. If you’re not, you undoubtedly want to know how “analog” the R3 really sounds. Next to a real analog beast like a Moog Little Phatty, you can certainly tell the difference, but a monophonic synth that costs several hundred dollars more isn’t a fair comparison. Virtual analog synths in the same price range, such as the Novation XioSynth and Roland SH-201 (reviewed Jan. ’07 and Nov. ’06, respectively) make more sense, and next to these, both I and the Keyboard staffers thought that the R3 sounded subtly more analog and less virtual, with a denser low end and creamier highs. That’s not to say that I couldn’t coax some digital grunge when I wanted it — cranking up the treble EQ and Drive/Waveshaper to extremes did the trick here.

The keyboard action, though adequate for a synth, is light, with no aftertouch. At plenty of gigs, I have both hands on keyboards, one foot on a sustain pedal, and the other on a volume pedal, so it’s key to be able to add further expression with finger pressure, and the R3’s virtual patch section taunts me with all the ways in which I could do this. Not to single out the R3 — most keyboards at this price lack aftertouch — but I’d pay a little more for my synths if the industry made this a higher priority overall.

CONCLUSIONS

So where does the Korg R3 stand in the subcompact, sub-$1,000 field? The Roland SH-201 has more knobs and sliders in a more analog-style layout, but for analog audio character, the R3 is the leader. With its light-up knobs and multiple LCD displays, the R3’s user interface conveys that it’s not trying to be a virtual analog machine exclusively, though it certainly succeeds at this. Factor in the arpeggiator, vocoder, modulation sequencer, and broader tonal palette provided by the extra digital waveforms and Multiple Modeling Technology, and it becomes clear that the R3 bests anything in its class for sheer sonic power and flexibility, though if you need “workstation-y” sampled waves in a tiny keyboard, you should check out the Korg MicroX (reviewed Jan. ’07). Where the R3’s USB connection is MIDI-only, both the XioSynth and SH-201 can work as audio interfaces, something that recommends them to musicians who wish to perform with a laptop, a synth, and no other hardware. If Korg added this feature to the R3 (and perhaps aftertouch, too) there’d be no reason to consider anything else. As it stands, the R3 is a lovable little monster that will exceed your expectations, whether you’re looking for an electronic-focused lead synth to expand a rig where a stage piano or workstation covers the more organic sounds, or for a “my first synthesizer” that’s a real synthesizer, not a ROMpler with a couple of filter knobs. If you take one home on impulse, you won’t regret it . . . and you can tell your spouse we said so!

JARGON JOCKEY

• DWGS: Digital Waveform Generation System. Developed by Korg in the ’80s, these additive-based waveforms were the centerpiece of their DW6000 and DW8000 synths, and later used in the MS-2000 and MicroKorg as well. They were more complex than basic saw, triangle, pulse, and sine waves.
• Waveshaper: A synthesis component of the R3 that you can place either pre- or post-filter. As the name suggests, it can alter the shape of the waveform, transforming or distorting the sound in ways from subtle to aggressive. These include drive, decimator, hard clip, sub-octave (which adds a sound one octave below that of oscillator 1), pickup simulator, and level boost.

GORY DETAILS

INTERNAL SOUNDS
128 programs, 16 formant motion data sets.

OSCILLATOR WAVEFORMS
Sawtooth, pulse, triangle, sine, formant, noise, DWGS digital waveforms, audio in. MMT features include cross and ring modulation, variable phase modulation (simple FM), and osc 1 unison mode.

FILTERS
2 multimode resonant filters: lowpass (12 or 24dB/octave), highpass, bandpass, comb (filter 2 only).

VOCODER
128 programs, 16 formant motion data sets.

EFFECTS
1 insert effect per timbre, 2 band EQ per timbre, master effect.

ARPEGGIATOR
6 arpeggio types with step on/off.

CLAIM CHECK

Jerry Kovarsky of Korg states, “In designing the R3, we took the powerful MMT multiple-modeling synthesis engine from the Radias and brought it into a more affordable and even more portable configuration. It was important to us not to lose much of the synthesis capabilities, nor the formant-recording vocoder, and in the end we made minimal changes. The versatility of the oscillator sources (waveforms, modulation, and more than just ‘virtual analog’ possibilities), the unique filter configurations, and the drive/waveshaping help the R3 to surpass other products in its price group, which tend to be much more basic virtual analog engines. We also spent a lot of time making the interface easy to use without needing a lot of knobs. Deisgned for keyboardists, producers, remixers, or instrumentalists and vocalists who double on keys, the R3 is applicable to a wide variety of uses and musical styles, and easily fits into tight studio and stage setups.”