Korg OASYS - two years later - The Basics
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 12 Nov 2006

The Basics

When you turn this baby on, it boots Linux-based OASYS kernel. Very cool feeling, especially if you're a huge Linux fan and Linux solutions developper/system integrator like myself. After a couple of seconds, you see "OASYS" picture with the slidebar below it, showing the progress of the booting process. The X-Windows-ish interface is rock stable and very easy to use via TouchView. But, subjectiveness on the side, this was a pure vision-driven decision, to make it Linux-based, considering the fact that OASYS has been 3-4 years in the making (ok, 10 years, but let's forget about the initial project for a second). Especially with the CPU/architecture base, which will make the development of the future products very easy and not so expensive. Now I wonder if there's some OASYS 2 project in development somewhere :-) Hmm, with Core 2 Duo, Kentsfield or AMD's 4x4... Yummy.
As far as the "synths" are concerned, all three of them that made it into the initial 2005 release (HD-1, AL-1 and CX-3) sound amazing. While I'm used to hearing CX-3 organic sound because I like playing the CX-3 (and the CX-3 implementation inside the OASYS is awesome), I was really astonished with the sound quality of HD-1 and AL-1. You might think that HD-1 is a cheap development of HI or ACCESS (back from the Triton or Trinity days), and AL-1 some replacement for MOSS (Trinity, Triton, Z1), but you are way wrong. HD-1 sounds really do sound a couple of classes better then anything I've heard from Korg before. Compared to HI/ACCESS synths, it's really much more detailed, with some large improvements on the low and high end as well. This is the main difference I noticed from spending hours listening to presentations and trying the thing for myself - detail. If you bought Triton or Triton Studio and you're missing some of the sounds Trinity had (just a simple example), you won't miss that anymore. For sure I am one of these people, because I missed pads, electric pianos and some other sounds as well like hell - they really sounded better on the Trinity to me. But OASYS has a bunch of really rich pads, very powerful and sweet, warm-sounding pads that will make you smile. I'm using them very often in my COMBI sounds and - I have to tell you - pads really sound amazing.
AL-1 is a completely different thing, and comparing it to MOSS is like comparing 20-year old Golf to a brand new Lincoln (and, to tell you the truth, I like MOSS very much!). I have never heard such a deep analogue sound, and I've tried all there is to try on the market. The sounds are fat, detailed, very powerful, and filters and OSC's will make your speakers break into millions of pieces, if you want them to. Way, way more powerful then MOSS the sound is, Yoda would say...
The control surface is very intuitive, pretty much Korgish. You will need to spend some time with the OASYS to "get to know each other", because it has so many possibilities that make this thing complicated, but you'll get the hang of it, with some time. Those endless amount of knobs and switches and pots will give you a complete control. Of course, there's a huge 10.4" color TouchView screen, that makes it even easier to use. Everything is pretty straighforward and driven-by-pure-logic. Of course, coming from the fact that this thing has KARMA technology inside, it was pretty much a logical thing to do to include the pads right beneath the TouchView screen (8 pads). You can use these pads for many things (velocity sensitive or with constant velocity, per program or per combi), but the main thing many people use them is to trigger chords. This is extremely useful when you have complex arrangements that you couldn't do with your two hands in a normal live environment.