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send
$29,00 (USD) or
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or £24,00 (GBP) to this paypal address: [wcologarb
at gmail.com]
writing "opsix patches" + your email in the title / note.
Choose the correct currency in the "Recipient Gets" currency menu if you see it
(please do not use PLN currency:) I will send the
soundpack after I get notified about your payment
(max 24 hours).
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here's full explanation).
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(you will get a unique download link after the purchase).
How many patches?:
You will receive all the sounds from my Youtube & Soundcloud demos plus extra sounds (250 original presets + their variations = 274 presets in total).
Need to hear more?:
The Youtube demo part 1 is an "ultrafast version",
here's an audio demo with full length patches:
http://sounds-for-synths.com/jexus_opsix_part1_extended.mp3
Here's even more sounds that are not demonstrated in
neither part 1 nor part 2 on Youtube:
Soundcloud
What genre / style?:
There is no one style. It's a wide
variety of sounds that are meant to inspire and make you look at the synth in a
different light. Some patches are bread & butter, some offbeat; they're the
result of me trying to find the limits of the instrument. The patches are
ready-to-use in music or can serve as starting points; you can find the textures
or the dynamics that you like and tweak them to suit your exact taste or purpose.
I tried not to include patches that would overlap with any other soundsets out
there, so 90% of my patches should be original-sounding to you.
What format / import method?:
My patches come under the name "WCOG" in a soundbank saved in "op6lib" format - a library that can
be imported into your Opsix via the Korg Opsix Librarian (standard procedure
from the user's manual).
Any external stuff?:
I did not use
any external FX in the demo;
all the delays,
reverbs, sound deformations & noises come from the Opsix engine / mod matrix.
I recorded my demo straight through an audio
card.
Notes on grades lower than 3/3:
[vintage]: possible with some
tricks, but not a wise choice for vintage tones
[low end]: ok, but not as much as the majority of synths
[high end]: some people may find it "mid-rangey" or "nasaly" sounding
[timbre plasticity]: amazing but often retains the "dry" or "digital" aura
[build quality]: flimsy & plasticky, may easily break during risky situations
[ui & ease of use]: clever & ergonomic, but still requires menu-diving
BUILD
QUALITY
I saw the prototype over the Internet and I thought:
COOL! I saw the
actual model released to shops and I thought: OK...
I finally bought one
myself and took it out of
the box and I thought: OH CRAP!... 777 Euro for this? Korg has sucked me
dry. I'm scratching my head and thinking: is this some new type of synthesis that Korg invested 5 years of
research & development into? Is
it some space technology, analog circuitry? Is the synth big, with lots of
knobs, and is it
made of metal or wood? If the answer to all these questions is "no", then another
one immediately pops up: where is this price coming from? Maybe we have
reached a time when it is simply enough to make a new toy and all the lonely nerds and
quarantined covidians will throw their cash at it...
Let me start with the exterior. The Opsix does not make a good initial impression
- it looks and feels like something coming out of a 1980 Casio shop. It's the most plastic synth I've held in my
skinny hands. I don't
think there is even one metal element in it, apart from the 1-milimeter thick surface
panel plate. The keybed is as bad.
I won't say horrible, because that word is reserved for Soviet-era synths from
Russia, but it's... plasticky. Kind of like a toy. OK, it's not like a toy, but
it would be - had Korg gone one notch lower. I know this is
not a guitar so the shapes and materials don't matter that much. Also, one can live with
that kind of quality in a home studio setting where the synth is safe. But bring me all the people who complained that the
€ 600 Modal Argon8 is of low quality. I want to hear what they have to say
about the Opsix.
UI
Here things look much better, however, I have a number of complaints. The Opsix was supposed to be the synth which made FM
synthesis easy - I'm not really sure if it does. It definitely tricks you into thinking it's easy, because it has
several knobs (while the DX-7 had none), and it has a 2-inch-wide display (while the
DX-7 had a one-inch-wide display). Of course once you get used to the interface and
remember all the pathways, there is less ground for criticism and the workflow is
acceptable. But to tell you
the truth,
I am confused. Why doesn't this synth have more
knobs and buttons? The Wavestate / Minilogue were cheaper
yet they had more of everything on the panel (the Minilogue XD had it all:
high-quality knobs & switches, metal chassis and a wood piece). I understand that an FM engine
with six operators and all the gadgets would entail a massive amount of real-time controls, but I'm
not asking for that.
Let me start with the observation that there are no individual buttons for the six
operators. Each operator should have a [ON / OFF] button or a [MUTE] button. It
is crucial to be able to hear the presence or absence of individual operators in
FM without changing their volume. Korg decided to bury this feature in a menu... Also, there should be an additional row of buttons
underneath the existing one for SEQ, VOICE, MOD MATRIX and other features currently
accessible only via SHIFT button. And tell me - where the heck is the "key hold"
button? In my view there are too many things that are missing / buried that could have been brought
up to the surface. Analog subtractive
synths which are easy to understand have much more generous panels. It's
a really
important issue, because if you don't know what you're doing in the FM dominion,
or you do not take full control over it, you
can forget about getting
tolerable sounds from it. Your FM synth is going to sound like a broken radio (or
a cheesy 1980 Casio / stock-preset Whitney Houston's DX-7).
So be warned: editing the Opsix to its fullest
potential equals constant
clicking between pages of the modules. It is okay if you want to make
some traditional sounds, because Opsix can work as a traditional synth with its
sawtooths and filters, plus the quality FX unit is a quick gateway to make
something nice (I think Opsix has the most interesting setup of reverbs). But it is not
a good way to make FM easy. Of course it's
much easier than DX-7, but is this the best we can get?
I personally hoped for more. It's nowhere near the Minilogue in terms of clarity and ease
of use, and there seem to be better hardware interfaces if you want to learn FM.
But overall - and objectively - it's fine. Comfy &
ergonomic. The tweaking process is
not that much different than the
Hydrasynth's (step1: click a button ->
step 2: twist a knob
assigned to a display slot). It's a bit more cumbersome due to the small size
of the Opsix, its screen and shared (shift) buttons, but if you want me to compare it to yet another synth,
I'll say the screen design and the editing
process is much
better than, for example, Behringer Deepmind's. You might be surprised with this opinion,
because the Deepmind has waaaay more knobs (or sliders) and a larger screen. But the Deepmind
screen has lags, and there's so much things packed into it that navigating becomes
tedious. Opsix on the other hand seems to have a very fast processor and a nice,
symmetrical screen-to-knob cross-reference, which makes
its menu-diving experience much better. To tell you the truth, I even prefer
to dive into the Opsix menu to reach the third LFO than to play this stupid game of
latching and un-latching the LFO3 button in the Modal Cobalt 8.
Korg has managed to
squeeze the most out of this limited layout and maybe this is what we're paying
for - their brains (and their asses, sitting in an R&D office on an expensive piece of real estate
in California - too bad they couldn't for all that money build a normal librarian software and we
have to go through 11 steps to install it. Here's a passage from the installation
manual: "The Sound Librarian communicates with the opsix using networking
over USB (as opposed to MIDI). Networking uses the RNDIS protocol, which is
included with Microsoft Windows, but not included with MacOS. The installation
includes not only the Sound Librarian itself, but also HoRNDIS (an
implementation of RNDIS) on MacOS, and Bonjour on Windows" - yeah, ok,
thanks Korg, everything's clear. Back in the day I would just click a button and
send a sysex library to my computer. Now I have to deal with "progress").
THE SOUND (or rather THE SOUNDS)
I think this is the strongest area of this synth and
the trump card that makes you turn a blind eye to its imperfections. The starting tone is
very thin, static & barren and makes you wanna cry,
like in the Korg Radias or Roland SH-01 / SH-201. After a while it leans toward
something I'd call a fusion of vintage Korgs - MS-20 & Polysix (with some
Oberheim) and something more modern / creative / whacky, like a Virus TI or an Ensoniq Fizmo
- this is where excitement kicks in. Then it becomes an alpha-male chameleon, and the ensuing
bewilderment and joy are hard to control, and I'm not sure if I'm listening to
my Opsix or some E-MU module / NI Komplete plugin. This course of action is again similar
to the Hydrasynth's. It may be the source of controversy and the reason for love / hate camps -
just as the Hydra was being described as "harsh-sounding", for some people the Opsix may sound more like a PCM
workstation than a traditional Prophet / Nord / Waldorf synth. Well, chameleons
have their downsides too - they don't sound like a million bucks right out of
the box.
But in my opinion this
route is the
good news, for at least two reasons. One - it's something different; it's not an
obvious, hackneyed sound. Two - it's "laid back" yet "present" (a pleasing
quality for the ear) and amazingly
versatile in its shapeshifting ability. Opsix's six operators with
detailed settings, various filters, various waveforms, user-defined algorithms, lots of FX and a mod matrix that can
modulate practically all of it make up a force to be reckoned with, and enable the synth to create a
remarkable, practically speaking neverending supply of original patches. I think this is the kind of synth that will
yield a huge collection of customs sounds over the coming years because each person tweaking it will
approach it somewhat differently. The generous engine gives tons of possibilities for every synthesis
school out there. The only proviso is that you have to modulate quite a number of
parameters to bring it all to life.
Two words for those of you who wonder how it
compares against the DX-7 - here I don't have good news for you. Opsix loses the old warmth and organicness of DX-7 somewhere along
the way. When I had both the DX-7 and the
Casio CZ-5000, I thought that the CZ
sounded like crap. But compared with Opsix, even the CZ sounds better in some
respect. The CZ
lacks the aforementioned depth and organicness of the DX-7, but at least it has this nice
grunge lo-fi sound to it. The Opsix fails even at that. It does have a "lo-fi"
effect and 8 / 12-bit waves that you can activate, but come on - it's like
putting lipstick on a corpse. OK, maybe I'm being too brutal. I'll say this: it's
not that authentic. It's just
noise. Or maybe the noise loses its appeal because the basic waves /
sound generators are
too "precise". I'm not sure which way it goes. So if you're a DX-7 nerd, be warned:
the Opsix has a lot of stuff to degrade the sound and make it more dusty /
lo-fi, but it is not a DX-7 kind of lo-finess (or it's not an "innate" lo-finess
- again, you have to modulate it to make it sound convincing.)
THE END
So in the end I'm a little bit in two minds trying
to judge it all in an objective fashion. On the one hand
I've learned & accepted the interface, and even though I don't always enjoy
the
Opsix's often-surfacing Radias-like dehydrated tone, I do love the original sounds that I've managed to
achieve on it and they inspire me to play
some music. At the end of the day it's all that matters. To say that it's a great synth for modern leads, acoustic plucks,
industrial / techno sequences and
ambient pads / soundscapes is a
criminal understatement. Leaving the staple aside, to me the Opsix has become the first go-to
choice for some never-heard-before novelty sounds & textures, and to my ears each and every one of these sounds has its appeal. Dirty, clean,
metallic, woody,
robotic, aggressive, silky-smooth, retro, decayed, bizarre, evolving - there is no end of adjectives that could be
used to describe the results. If there is anything that Opsix and DX-7 have 100%
in common, it's the "multi-personality and inspiring ambiguity" that defies
categorization. It can imitate
or emulate various instruments, phenomena and technniques of sound production, be it cello, mellotron
/ optigan, or bugs in a meadow. And this is wonderful and amazing to an extent that
is rarely seen in the synth world. I mean it. I think it's one of the most
interesting and capable synths to be released in recent years. I made around 200
varied sounds in the first couple
of weeks but I only scratched the surface and I'll never uncover the rest due to
the limitations of my imagination.
I really missed the Opsix when my friend borrowed it for 3 weeks - I felt deprived of
adventure. In your traditional analog synth it has become hard to find an untraveled path.
After all, what can you do with "two oscillators and a filter". With Opsix, all the
details like volume levels, key tracking and osc feedbacks make a difference and
create a
web of never-seen-before intersections and interactions. Maybe this is the future of digital
synths - quality DSP with a modular system underneath.
On the other hand, I'm wondering about the
difference between these "cut-corners" modern synths like Opsix and a high-quality VST plugin
with a midi controller attached to it. If this is the future of synths, then I
guess we've all lived through it already. Also, my memories of and longing for the
DX-7 and my too high expectations
for the interface do not allow me to fully appreciate this synth (I wrongly anticipated a knobby DX-7 on steroids).
And even if the UI is better than the Elektron Digitone, the current shape of this
machine is still leaving me wanting. The Opsix should have the interface of the Matrixbrute, and a 4-or-5 octave
keyboard with aftertouch. A three octave keyboard makes it really difficult to create, polish
and eventually play your pad or lead sounds. Again, I have
to repeat: this is an FM synth, not a mono bass synth! Look at that unused space below the shift buttons and above
the 16 sequencer buttons: it's 1 x 10 inches of free space and it just begs to be filled with some knobs, preferably
for the envelope(s) or user / macro assignments. And why oh why didn't we get a joystick like in the
Wavestate? I see a considerable amount of wasted potential for a truly
great instrument. The question is how much more above the
€777 (or the current
€580)
price tag we would have to pay for all these goodies. I
myself would like to pay a bit more, but instead have a product that makes more sense,
like the Hydrasynth. If Opsix looked
more like the Hydrasynth on the outside (poly aftertouch, more generous UI), and
gained some minor improvements of the firmware (panning control, more precise
envelope settings) I dare say it would enter the same
league. Hydra is a different kettle of
fish for sure; it leans more towards the classic analogue sound and has things that the Opsix does not have (wavetables,
formant filters), but it applies
the other way round too (Opsix's 6 op FM, motion sequencing) so at the end of
the day both synths prove to be a sound
explorer's playground.
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