Why I LOVE the Korg Poly-61
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- Опубліковано 3 лют 2023
- The Korg Poly-61 is the most recent addition to our synth family and is responsible for some beautiful sounds! From strings, synth brass, space cathedral, to helicopters and horns... this thing can do it all! It's fairly easy to program and once you get the hang of it, there's really no limitations to the sounds you can sculpt. Check out why I love the Korg Poly 61!
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I have owned TWO poly-61Ms and they are excellent!!
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Good video. I've had 2. The first in 1985 and sold it and then got another, I still have, in 1993 almost new in the box. That it, it was in the box but only used a few times. I also knew where it came from. Anyways, here's a trick to do that it does a fantastic job at. Layered filter sweep. Program a nice slow rising filter sweep with lots of resonance but not to self oscillating. Save it. Then use chord memory to layer all six oscillators as you wish. Here's how. Press hold and hit every C note on the keyboard. Then hit chord memory. Now play one note for the entire sweep. Cool huh!! Hit Poly and then hold. Then hit the lowest C note 6 times. You will be stacking all 6 oscillators on top of each other. Hit chord memory. Now you have a very fat lead. Hit Poly again and Hold. Hit the lowest C note 3 times and the next highest 3 times. Hit chord memory. You get the idea.
Also, has your Poly 61 been calibrated? If not, I highly recommend you have it done. This puts the VCF and resonance in tune. You heard right. Also the scale and squaring up the square waves. I've got the service manual and I do mine about every 5 years or so. And, mine is probably overdue. It's not a difficult thing to do. Not that many adjustments. Unlike my Jupiter 8 with 3 tuning trimmer pots per the 16 VCOs. It's an all day job to do it. Literally.
Dude can you share the manual? Might be very worth it. I don't have mine.
Good to see this! Only two days ago I brought mine back to life by meticulously cleaning the CPU board and adjacent ribbon cables which the old battery had eaten into. After a battery change and yup, even more internal cleaning I loaded all my old patches from 10 long years ago and its all circuits go!!! I've found you can easily get some delicious Prophet 5, gluey synth brass patches and the cathedral chimes are superb as well. Add some FX like a Strymon or a Microcosm and the pads become amazing as well. :) Peace out!!
Cant wait to buy the solo album.
still got mine, it was my first synth and still functioning. :) Despine the yellowed whit keys and broken joystick.
Had one in the 90s. I think many owners install a battery holder instead of just replacing the battery. This is what was done on my dw8000. I wish I still had my Poly61, it had a good sound.
Excellent review on an underapreciated synthesizer!!!
Thank you!!
This is the most early 80's synth I can think of from the era when everyone got a VCR or a C64. It just has that digital plastic-ness to it. Good video
Can't beat that gray plastic adorned with pastel blue lines!
Hi Doris ! The Korg Poly-61 is one of the synthesizers i really miss in my old collection, sounded so good,..it was so special, miss mine dearly,..but glad you got one and we can hear it on your and Matthew´s productions. Thanks a lot for shareing😍🤩
Nice video thanks 👍
I LOVE THAT YOU LOVE THE KORG POLY 61!!!!
I love that you love the Korg that the lovely lady loves as well
As a tech that worked on many of these you did a really good review... yes those batteries i replace and move them off the board because they damage connector and PC traces and that's why it can get expensive..if anyone has one in a closet or storage get the battery serviced before it damages things,,
Thanks so much for posting! I too LOVE the Poly-61..I used to have one years ago and it was a damn fine synth,,the brass, strings and organ sounds (to name a few) were great-sounding. You did a wonderful overview of a super-cool keyboard.
This clip gives you the me such wonderful memories of the Poly 61 as it was the synth in my secondary school. I pymohyemnrf the hell out of this synth between 1987 and 1990 as well as using it in the music department and for a number of gigs at the time. It was limiting in terms of programming but it was a perfect way to get into synth programming. I became a big Korg fan and owned over a dozen Korg instruments between 1991 and 2016 when I sold my very used Korg T3EX after over 25 years of heavy duty use!
I'm focusing on what I love, too.
I actually played a new one of these in a band in the '80s. It was affordable, had presets and sounded okay. It's a good intro to how synths work since it's relatively simple to program, too. What more could you want?
My dad bought one of those new. He had the dealer install the factory MIDI kit when it became available a few months after he bought it. I found
it to be kind of fatiguing to listen to, to be honest. I did do some programming on it, and built a patch using a guide published in Polyphony
magazine to get a human voice sound; by golly it worked and sounded pretty good. It's funny how I can just glance at the lettering on the panel
now and instinctively know what everything does; it was pretty baffling when I was still in high school. Love your YC30; I've got one of those :)
Man, that must've been super cool getting one of these new! Writing some new songs on the YC30 as we speak!
Lovely demo! I too love the Poly-61... Add a stereo chorus to the mono out and it is 80s DCO Bliss!
Great job Doris
I had one and really miss it. :)
Hi! New fan here..
Thank you for producing such entertaining and informative videos!
Great work all around.
Thank you and welcome! 💚
I really miss my Poly 800.
SOOOO looking forward to your 1st solo album, Doris!!! This synth reminds me of my Korg Poly-800. (Just looked it up & it was released the year after.) I acquired the Korg Poly-800 in an odd way. I had a Sequential Circuits Max (very similar to the Sequential Circuits Six Trak you reviewed a while back.) but one cold winter day I got under the covers and stupidly dragged the synth on to my lap. This created a nasty static shock that killed it. I took it in to see if it could be repaired. 3 months passed by, so I contacted them about it. They seemed out of the loop, but offered me a 'loaner:' the Korg Poly-800. A year goes by, and the store contacts me about the Korg. I'm like- where is my Sequential Circuits Max? Hmmm, we'll get back to you. Next year, same conversation. Year 3: same, but by this point I was resolved that I would never see that Sequential Circuits Max again. Every year they'd call, every year I'd be ticked off. Finally after a decade of this ongoing situation I told them I would be keeping the Korg and that I never wanted to hear from them again. I still have the Korg to this day! (Mercifully, it miraculously does not have an internal battery problem?!?) Thanks for your cool videos- we always look forward to them!
Thanks for this. They should do this for all keyboards.
Had one in the mid 80s. Played Van Halen’s Jump, Eurythrmics’ Sweet Dreams & other synthersizer music on it for hours & hours. 😅 Such a great synthersizer, regret selling it in the mid 90s. 😢
Groovy..👌
The bass on this thing can be soooo full. Can be hard to mix, but if you need it it's their for its all encompassing bass low dirty bliss.
Great vid! I had one of these and always loved preset 18 which was a sort of pulsating, helicopter-like noise. I have never been able to confirm if it is a factory preset or was unique to mine. Since you had the factory ones loaded I was curous if you could answer this. Thanks!
One of the few synths that has the potential of a wide range sound pallet with only 20 parameters. Chord memory is also cool.
The OFF function for OSC 2 is still a weird one though, it would've been great if the polyphony would double just like its inferior brother/sister/synthperson the poly-800 which has way too many params.
Brass in octaves sounds nice, somehow it reminds me of.. Something.. But what is it..?
1:45 yeah
Hi there, have you ever done a comparison between the Korg DW8000 and 6000?
For change the bateri on poli 61 we must save the paches befote ?
I have one, but it hasn't been used in almost 20 years. Do I dare try to power it up?
Beatifull sounds ¡¡ thank's for your video...likes from Ecuador :)
That "popcorn" sound sounds like a kick drum to me.
great video. I have 2 of these and they rock. I have aa MK1 and a MK2, main difference is the way the voice boards are connected and arranged. MK1 has way more connectors making it mode unreliable in general
I prefer P61's sound over poly 6 although P6 has better filter and makes better stringer type of sounds but for classic poly 80's it sounds very organic and punchy (with a bit of digital flare) for being DCO synth imho. The simplicity makes the programing idiot proof but I know people will complain for not having knobs blah. It needs FX to shine. One useful mod is to have switch for enabling continuous 2nd free running LFO to Filter for nice sweeping effect controllable from a knob on the panel
I miss my 61. 😢
That popcorn sound is pure Glitch, shouldve kept some of dem weirdo sounds
Oh man this rules so hard
Nice synth! Juno 6 has only 1 DCO/voice - JX-3P might be a little more similar in that they are both 2 DCO/voice synths. There are trade offs with each. Would love to have one.
I bought 2 of these for £28 and £50 when it was still possible to do so off ebay.
I only bought it because after selling my Juno6 and 60 in the 1990s for next to nothing and seeing how analogue prices were going I decided to buy up all the lesser know analogue polysynths I could get my hands on as cheap as possible for as long as possible.
At the same time I bought a Korg EX800 in pieces for £18 an Akai AX73 for £50 And a JX3 for £80( which I repaired and sold for huge profit) And an original Mk1 Novation Bass Station rack for £80.
Both poly 61s were dead, corrosion dead batteries and unstable PSUs One I referbished changed the end cheeks for walnut and sold it for £400 the other one had a knackered keyboard which was unrepairable. I did find a replacement but the courier decided he'd fold it into 3 to get it through my letter box. In the end I made a new board and fitted non tactile cherry switches from a dead AT cherry computer keyboard. the synth works perfectly(now) but I could never sell it like that. Not that I would because although its no Juno6 or 60 it has a unique 80 polysynth sound.Which IMO has a better low end than the Juno anyway.
I did intend to do some mods by adding a second Env to control the .VCA seperately from the filtre and do the pot mod where you bypass the digital control and access the OSC and filtres directly like a polysix from knobs and switches . I also started to build a midi kit for it but never got around to finishing it. Partly because these things in original condition suddenly became more valuable.
All the other Keyboards I bought cheap I still have and they all still work.
I thought those days were gone but about a year ago I was given a dead Korg Dw6000 for free.
It had 3 dead ICs but only took a couple of evenings to find the faults and repair. And thats also now part of a "Vintage Collection" That includes an Ms6, CZ3000 I bought for £30 a DX7 and a Kawai K3 and all the Digital gear I bought new in the late 80s and early 90s Yes I have the obligatory M1r and Kawai K1r a Kurzweil K2K and A JD800 as well as about 18u of synth modules that I can't name off the top of my head and another 18u of FX and midi patch bays and routers that I also can't name off the top of my head
And 3.5 ensoniq EPS samplers 1 original 1 original thats toast 1 eps16+ rack and one keyboard version all are fullexpanded. But just to make sure I had enough analogue I also picked up 3 cheap behringers ModelD Pro1 and Deepmind 12 all as modules.
And all of these ( that includes the Korgs the akai casio and so on from ebay) were still way cheaper than you'd pay for the latest digital offering from Roland.
Sometimes I like to torture myself by looking up the Poly 61. I used to have one as a kid in the late 90's. A friend of my parents heard I really liked music and wanted to play an instrument, so they gave me this one. I played the bejebus out of it, even though I couldn't actually play or understand synthesis. Then, in the early 2000's, we moved and my parents didn't want to 'lug along that old piece of junk.'
I still miss that thing..
Midi?
I scored one a little over a year ago for $100 as it was broke as shit. Rebuilt one of the cables, replaced some keys, replaced the voice board, and rebuilt the enclosure and she’s become a great synth. A lot of people tell me it’s a crap synth, but then love it with I play it live. Go figure lmao
Yeahhhh korg poly 2 here but also my new casio ctk7200
Nice video.
Kebu has one of these in his vast collection ( eg perplexagon part 3).
Still haven't turned mine on in years. Reading comments had got me worried about the battery leakage potential.
Ironically I sold my poly6 and kept the 61 because it sounded better, which spec wise it shouldn't
Ooohh I had one of these and a roland hs80 and a boss drum machine and a alesis sequencer, all for the princely sum of 280 uk pounds, this was mid 99s when nobody wanted them. Selling them was a gargantuan mistake.oooohhh
Legowelt mods the joystick. Break the spring and you've got another LFO when you bend up.
Popcorn is for drum sampling.
Ziveliii !!!
you will need to walk to get your beer..lol
My Korg DW 8000 has the same patch numbering. No 9's anywhere. It starts with patch number 11.
That was also true of the DW6000 and Poly 800.
Two dcos. 👍
Gracias te doy, mujeres como tú nos salvan del tedio que es la horrible música actual. Propuestas como las de ustedes hacen que uno siga creyendo en el rock, nuevamente gracias 😉😊✌🤘
Den musst du pflegen... Er ist nicht der jüngste. Hab einen Mono/Poly - Fällt auch langsam auseinander. ;)
I have a polysix.
I had the 61m. Regret letting it go.
I've heard of the 61M but am unaware of what the main differences are, what would you say is the main distinguishing factor between the two?
@@dreammachine432 MIDI was part of the 61M but not all of the Poly 61s.
Not entirely knobless, mind
All i heard was a muppet talking continously 😢
I Love your equipment !
Too much talking, not enough playing.