Product Review - Korg MS20 Mini

Reviews : Keyboard

For the best part of 20 years, musicians have been asking certain Japanese manufacturers for recreations of their classic synths, and finally one of them has been brave enough to do it. How does Korg’s reborn MS20 compare to its illustrious ancestor?

Gordon Reid

Look back at contributions to the various synthesizer forums in early January and you’ll see how vehemently the leaked news of the MS20 Mini was derided. I remember one writer confidently stating that, “the chance of Korg bringing out an MS20 in 2013 is about the same as you and I being able to travel to the moon and back in 2013”. Well, I haven’t been to the moon (or back) yet, although there are still eight months to go, so who knows what may happen. On the other hand, I’m already sitting next to an MS20 Mini, which Korg describe as “the classic MS20 recreated”. I wonder if it is.

The Birth Of The MS20 Mini

Many people have speculated that the release of Korg’s Monotrons and Monotribe had, at least in part, been experiments to see whether the unending hype surrounding monophonic analogue synthesizers could be translated into sales. If true, Korg clearly feel that the experiment had been a success because Fumio Mieda (the designer of the original MS20) and Hiroaki Nishijima (Korg’s current chief engineer) recently went on record to say that “the next step should be a fully-fledged analogue synthesizer”. But should the company design a new instrument, or dredge up a design from the past? Ultimately, I suspect that — having come this far — the decision to remake the MS20 was unavoidable. It dominates the wish-lists of enthusiasts the world over, and Korg had already recreated it in software within the OASYS and the Kronos. The company had even built the MS20iC USB Controller for the plug-in version in the Legacy Collection. So the next step was to decide how closely to mimic the original.

As you can see, the original design was retained and, when possible, many of the original components were used internally. Where these were no longer available or had become illegal because of the ROHS (Regulations On Harmful Substances) legislation that came into force a few years ago, close equivalents were used. Consequently, the most noticeable difference between the Mini and the original MS20 is its size. The official line is that Korg felt that “it would be devaluing to make the new model exactly the same size as the original”. In other words, it’s smaller out of respect to the original. I don’t accept that for a nanosecond. I think that it was all about hitting the target price, and a full-size model might have made that impossible. But let’s be clear, the MS20 Mini is not built into the same case as the MS20iC controller. The keyboard is wider and deeper, the chassis is larger, the spacing between the knobs and sockets is greater and, well, you get the picture.

VCOs, VCFs & VCA

Perhaps the biggest changes from the original are at the rear of the Mini, where there’s a USB port, a MIDI In socket and an external PSU socket.

Although the MS20 looks complex, it’s based upon a fairly conventional dual-oscillator VCO/VCF/VCA monosynth. The first oscillator offers four footages ranging from 32’ to 4’, and four waveforms — triangle, sawtooth, variable-width pulse, and white noise — but there’s no pulse-width modulation, which is rather disappointing. The second oscillator offers a different range (16’ to 2’) plus detune of a little over an octave, and different waveforms: in this case, sawtooth, square, a fixed pulse, and ring modulation. The last of these is misnamed: the waveform is generated by the equivalent of a mathematical operation performed upon the pulse wave generated by VCO1 and the square wave generated by VCO2, and this creates a range of effects similar to ring modulation.

Published in SOS May 2013