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I've had the microkorg for something like a year now. The greatest part about it is the portability. It runs surprisingly well on batteries and after getting the dedicated microkorg gigbag, it's even better. The gigbag also includes a shoulder strap thing for playing live, which is terribly cool and all, but i doubt i'll ever use it. As most people have pointed out, the microkorg is descended from the ms2000, which is really big with dedicated knobs for almost everything. Since the microkorg is pretty small and doesn't have room for that, it has an edit matrix and five rotary knobs for adjusting parameters. The edit matrix is worth a mention, because initially i found it a bitch to use. Thankfully it turned out to be mostly a matter of practice and by now it's almost second nature. Not as good as dedicated knobs and buttons, but you can't have everything.
As for the synth engine, it's about the same as the ms2k synths, so much of this applies to the ms2k as well. The vocoder has 8 bands on the microkorg instead of 16 as on the ms2k, making it sound less "crisp" and clear. Perhaps it's just me, but the microkorg generally sounds less "crisp" than the ms2k. Cheaper D/A converters maybe? The ms2k/microkorg synth engine has NO support for aftertouch, which strikes me as a bit strange. Polyphony is very limited, with a maximum of only 4 voices. Don't be fooled by korg claiming that the microkorg is multitimbral. This is a euphemistic enough statement to border on being a lie. In practice, the "multitimbrality" is mostly useless, except as a way to layer sounds on top of each other to fatten them up. Most likely, you'll end up using this synth for basses or leads more than pads.
On the plus side of things, the sound is great. The resonant filters self oscillate like they should and the built-in effects are good enough for me to even use the microkorg as an effects processor for external units on occasion. Presets suck, but who cares - it's almost completely compatible with the ms2k, so once you've got some ms2k patches up and running, this baby really begins to shine.
The patch routing is reasonably powerful and gives you good flexibility in making your own patches, once you've mastered the editor or the edit matrix. Personally, i'd have liked more control of some of the parameters, but since this isn't supposed to be a modular synth i still think it's good enough.
Quality-wise, i think this is a case of getting what you pay for. The microkorg is very cheap for what it does so don't expect anything revolutionary. I've seen better, but i've certainly seen much worse. I've had the microkorg go all weird on me on a couple of occasions after long sessions, but nothing that a quick turning off and on wouldn't fix. With the right treatment, i'd trust my microkorg to do the job.
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