| Korg trinity rack synthesizer |
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When Korg released the Korg M1 music workstation a revolution on the keyboard market happened. Priced at around two thousand dollars, the Korg M1 had everything a keyboard player may need onstage or in the studio. There was a MIDI sequencer integrated, sixteen voice polyphony with sixteen oscillators, digital sample based sound library, sixty one keys with aftertouch sensitivity and velocity, original sounds and onboard effects, as well as expansion capabilities made this keyboard the best selling digital keyboard ever, easily outselling both, the Roland D-50 and the Yamaha DX7. During the production period that lasted about six years, more than quarter of a million units were sold, allowing Korg to become truly independent and buy out most of the Korg shares held by competitor Yamaha. Keio Electronic Laboratories, the original name of Korg, was established in 1962 by Tsutomu Kato, a nightclub owner in Tokyo and Tadashi Osanai, a University graduate in Tokyo and an accordionist who used to play in Kato's nightclub, accompanied by a Wurlitzer made rhythm machine called Sideman. Osanai was unhappy how the Wurlitzer performed and was convinced that he can build a better functioning machine. After some persuasion, Kato decided to finance the production.
In 1963, the first product was released called Donca matic DA-20, a disc rotary electric auto rhythm machine. Years later, around 1967, an engineer who had ideas and aspirations to build keyboards approached the new company and offered his services. Kato was impressed by Fumio Mieda and requested Mieda to build him a prototype, which took approximately a year and a half. The programmable organ was the first product sold under the brand name Korg, which stood for Keio and Organ, a combination of the two names. With the emergence of synthesizers, Kato accurately predicted the necessity to implement the new technology and release synthesizers as well, and the road towards the M1 was paved. Many successful synthesizers were built by Korg over the years, like the Korg Polysix and the follow up model Poly-61, the Korg Poly-800, a programmable synthesizer that cost less than a thousand US dollars, the DW-8000 featuring digital waveforms and an analog filter and then came the M1, which changed everything. Korg Trinity was released in 1996 and is regarded as the only true successor to the M1, creating a similar uproar like M1 did, more than ten years before. Featuring as a first workstation keyboard to offer modular expansion, which, besides sounds, allowed digital interfaces to be incorporated, making the keyboard more versatile than any previous workstation; Korg Trinity had the legendary ACCESS sound engine and the INFINITY processing, delivering a unique blend of sound to the keyboard. The Trinity TR-Rack had more sound banks and combinations preloaded, as well as digital in and out jacks. It was the second most successful Korg keyboard ever. |
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