The Korg Poly-800.... I aint used one of these since about 1986.... small plastic cased unit, with a simple LED 2 character display..... easy to edit.... check it out... 8 note poly DCO synth with real analog synthesis section, including nice Korg filters. The Poly-800 was lightweight, could be battery or mains powered & included guitar strap buttons to wear & perform with it live and to that end it added a joystick controller with which you could tweak Pitch bend on the left-right horizontal axis & DCO pitch mod for vibrato & Filter Modulation on the up/down vertical axis.
The Poly-800 had a stereo output & a Chorus built in which gave pads and other patches a rich stereo sound.
The Poly-800 is 8 note poly at 1 osc' per voice...... 2 osc per voice at 4 note poly is usual, so it's more likely to be a 4 note poly unit in most patch cases.
The DCO oscillators make their waveform tones by using either a selected Saw or Square wave by adding harmonics using additive square wave synthesis & Each DCO has its own 6-stage digital Envelope generator. There's a further 6-stage EG for the Filter & Noise.
The Poly-800 was actually unique in that it was the first synth to have a noise envelope seperate from the oscillators and that allowed Korg engineers to use white noise to simulate breath artefacts like attack 'chiff' for some sounds & create other noise effects.
The Poly-800 has an analog resonant low-pass 24dB/octave VCF shared by all voices which is switchable between single or multiple modes. In single mode the first key pressed triggers the filter envelope and unless all keys are released, the filter does not re-trigger with subsequent note presses, so it's like a filter latch with the first key press. In filter multi mode each key pressed in turn re-triggers the filter envelope, even if other keys are still pressed down.
64 program slots - built-in 256 note polyphonic sequencer which could be clocked to MIDI - The Poly-800 had 3 Key assign modes:
- Poly - 8 or 4 note with 2 DC's per voice is played as normal
- Hold - using the same polyphony (8 or 4 voice) rules, notes will sustain once pressed & released until new notes are played
- Chord - again using the same polyphony (8 or 4 voice) programmed chords of harmonic intervals can be played from a single note
It's an under-rated synth tbh which can generate some super 'classic analog' sounding growling or warm & rich pads, DX-7 like timbres a-plenty, very deep and solid basslines as well as flutey delicate & airy or howling, rasping & cutting leads; it can even do decent organ sounds too. One way to sum up the Poly-800 is that it can sound much more expensive than it was on release.
There was also a MK2 version Poly-800 which added a digital delay and a new colour scheme from the old green, so not great for long decay stuff, but a decent selection of waves make this little sibling to the DW8000 & 6000 great as a bargain-bin item.
The Poly-800 II arrived in 1986 for £599 which was almost identical but added a 1024ms max time delay with editable parameters which could be saved per-patch & a 2-band eq.
The super value £350 quid EX800 expander version was released in 1984
Read 18 comments
Add review/comment