ra korg outside the box

23/2/2014 RA: Korg: Outside the box

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Jordan Rothlein met Tatsuya Takahashi andTadahiko Sakamaki in Tokyo to put a face onhardware design and engineering.

One of the biggest stories in electronic music right now isn't limited to aparticular beat structure, music scene, nightclub, producer or record label.Whether you know it or not, you've heard it, maybe even seen it in action.You could easily pass it off as too niche to have much of an effect on whatyou hear and how it makes you dance—a black box, figuratively if notliterally. But its influence on how producers create and perform, and on thecharacter of their sound, has indelibly shaped our nights out these last fewyears.

The story is hardware—and at first brush, it wouldn't seem like much of adevelopment at all. Electronic music is the child of physical synthesizersand drum machines, but like so much in our world, those tools werereimagined as software once processing power caught up with analogcircuitry. Many bemoaned the loss of instrumental tactility and (debatably)better sound, but DAWs and soft synths did things those old boxescouldn't. And they almost certainly lowered the barrier of entry for theyoung producers whose bass-forward excursions fed the evolution of thelast decade of tunes.

You'd think a return to hardware would mean a step backward, butwhether it takes the form of a guitar pedal, a beastly analog filter or abespoke Eurorack component for modular systems, it's what nearly all ofthe producers I've spoken to over the last couple of years have been mostexcited about. That a high-tech digital reboot of some '80s holy grails

Korg: Outside the box

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would arrive not as soft-synths, but hardware—and become one of thebiggest stories of the year in electronic music, amongst production nerdsand laypeople alike—is certainly a sign of the times. As hardwareproliferated, I became curious about who and what was behind thesemachines. Music journalists devote much of their time to people whomake music with synthesizers, but I guessed there was an equallyinteresting story behind the people who make those synthesizers in thefirst place.

It was in this spirit that I wound up at the headquarters of Korg, aJapanese instrument manufacturer with a reputation for following their ownbeat. The company's Tokyo offices are in a simple glass building next toan amusement park on the outskirts of Tokyo's city center, and I wonder ifsome of the spirit of the place has rubbed off on Korg's design team.When I visited late last year, they were wrapping up their 50th year inbusiness, and it had been an exceptional one. At that January's NAMMShow in California, they introduced the MS-20 mini, a slightly scaled-down, MIDI-enabled reboot of a synth Korg made from 1978 through1983. A few months later, at Frankfurt's Musikmesse, they rolled out theVolca series, a trio of pint-sized but feature-rich units that recalledRoland's holy-grails: the 303, 808 and 909. The Volcas, small enough to fiton a cramped desktop and priced not to terrify producers who'dpreviously stayed in the box, seemed especially of-the-moment.Korg'spromotional videos showed Tatsuya Takahashi, the youthfulengineer who headed up the project, demonstrating the series' workflowwhile programming warm, dubby house that could pass for some of MoveD's more introspective material. Takahashi was my main reason forcoming here. I thought he might shed light on how hardware finds its wayinto the world, and help draw a link between the creativity of musicproduction and the very different sort that goes into designing asynthesizer.

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Takahashi and Tadahiko Sakamaki, a product designer with whom heworks closely, met me on the ground floor of the headquarters. Wearingthick-framed glasses and a crisp white shirt, Sakamaki could havepassed as an architect, and Takahashi, in a blazer, his cerebral protégé.The main lobby at Korg is set up like an instrument shop, the company'skeyboards mingling with guitars, amps and other musical fauna from thebrands Korg distributes in Japan. Nothing is for sale, though, and it wasclear off the bat that I wouldn't be invited upstairs; an artist might offer atour first thing, but Korg's workshops and studios are full of closelyguarded trade secrets. After swapping business cards, we took a seataround a low table, where the Volcas had been set up in series. It washard not to ogle—they'd just been released, and the initial stock was still arare sight.

I noticed that Takahashi and Sakamaki's cards were double-sided, withEnglish on one side and Japanese on the other, and asked Takahashi toexplain the rough parameters of his title, chief engineer. "That's my foreigntitle, actually," he said, with a lightheartedness that peeled back theformality that can accompany a Japanese business meeting. "I'm anobody if you've seen my business card." His translated title is somethingmore like "product leader," meaning he oversees and organizes specificprojects. "Because I don't have very many engineers working on them"—company policy dictates he can't say exactly how many—"I tend to do a lotof the engineering for them."

You sense he likes it that way. Takahashi was born in Japan but spentmost of his life in England, where he started tinkering with electronics andsound by the time he was 11 or 12. He wasn't a gear freak in thetraditional sense—instead of lusting after what was already on theshelves, he thought about what sounds he'd like to make and how hecould build tools to make them. "I think the problem with me," he says, "isthat I got into electronics before I got into music." It led to studies in



electrical engineering at Cambridge. While there, he bought an MS2000,Korg's now-discontinued virtual analog synth—his first point of contact,along with the MicroKorgs, KAOSS Pads and Electribes his music-making friends were using.

The tinkering spirit never dissipated. After Takahashi finished hisMaster's, he spent a year living at home and working on his own projects.When it came time to get a job, he looked in England for a bit before



moving to Japan, where he landed on the proverbial doorstep at Korg."So in Japan," he explained, "there's a very kind of set way of applying fora job. People start quite early on in university, and they spend maybe thelast year of their university trying to find a job so that it's all set up whenthey leave school. I didn't have all of that." As Takahashi told it, in 2006 hemore or less showed up asking for work and was told to at least comeback with a CV. He returned with one, as well as something he madeduring his year off: an eight-step sequencer with an individual oscillator foreach step, where waveforms could combine and clip to generate wildharmonics. "I didn't know what to say in an interview, I wasn't reallyprepared or anything, so I thought bringing in something I made was thebest way to get my message across."

The plan worked. "We talked about him a lot," remembered Sakamaki,who was already working for Korg at this point. "He was amazing."Takahashi started out working on bits for projects like the microKORG XL,the microSAMPLER and the KAOSS mixer, a run of projects that nowfeels a little like the end of an era for the electronic-music-leaning side ofKorg's business. (It's worth noting the company, which got its start in the'60s with primitive drum machines, also makes digital pianos, drum padsand even keyboards for toddlers.)

After Takahashi had been on board for awhile, Sakamaki had the feelinghe wanted to shake things up a bit. "I wanted to restart a lot of things fromscratch," he said, so he made a pitch that was destined to appeal toTakahashi's love of analog circuits: a diminutive, all-analog synth theycould sell for $50. The synth that resulted, the Monotron, was like nothingelse on the market when it arrived in 2010—a true analog synth that ran offbatteries. You were tempted to buy one even if you had no real use for it inyour studio. Its defining feature, a ribbon controller, was less a creativeflourish than a necessity to stay within Sakamaki's size and cost limits.You couldn't get precise about playing particular notes, but Sakamaki andTakahashi realize now that wasn't really the point. In doing away withwhat's intimidating about analog synths—most of the controls, namely—the Monotron could emphasize their gorgeous sound, priming ears for themore fully featured machines that would come in a few years' time.

Under Sakamaki's guidance and Takahashi's technical prowess, Korgexpanded on the Monotron line in 2011, introducing versions with dualoscillators (the Monotron Duo), delay (the Monotron Delay) and a featureset more like a full-on synth (the Monotribe). Along the way, Takahashiwas coming into his own not just as an electrical engineer, but as anelectrical engineer designing musical instruments. Korg's team is built ongenerations of the company's engineers, including Fumio Mieda, thedesigner behind the original MS-20, so Takahashi had no shortage ofinspiration within the building. "When I first started work on the Monotron,"Takahashi said, "I had a prototype that didn't sound very good, and[Mieda] looked at my circuit and said, 'You know, this is from a textbook.This looks like a measurement tool. It's a very cold circuit.' If you look at hiscircuits, they're kind of out there. If you're not an engineer you won't get it,but he'll use transistors in a way that would be unimaginable. You look at

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the circuits and can't understand how they work—until you've been lookingat it for hours and hours and you kind of work it out. But they soundwonderful."

The success of the Monotrons showed there was a market for analogsound, and Sakamaki's hunch as a product designer was to keep theform factor small. The first idea for a follow-up was to keep expanding onthe Monotribe, but as Takahashi remembers it, Sakamaki came to him



with a drawing of a small device with 16 steps. Thus the Volca series wasborn. "The idea was that we wanted to make a series of products thatwould enable people to actually make a track," Takahashi said. "So it hadto be quite usable in terms of making a track, at the same time beinginteresting and fun to play." They built a drum machine and bass synth firstbut, conscious of the need to create something self-contained, added apolyphonic microsynth to the concept. Sakamaki was specific about sizeand cost, but he figured Takahashi, whose musical preferences fall in thedeeper end of house and techno, wouldn't need much guidance in termsof sound. "When I start a product," he said, "I am always crafting tunes toexplain what sound I need. But when I work with him, I don't do that,because I trust him. I believed that he could create a sound for this."

Crafting the sound of a synthesizer, as opposed to crafting sound with asynthesizer, is less about artistry and more about meeting concept andcosting through creative problem solving. I asked Takahashi how heconceptualized the sound, and he seemed a bit thrown. "That's quite anabstract thing to talk about, because to be honest, I don't think, 'Alright, Iwant this kind of sound, therefore I will use this circuit.' It's more, kind of, 'Iwant to use this circuit' first for me. I don't know if you can reallyunderstand an engineer's view, wanting to use a certain circuit." Heoffered his filter choice for the Volcas as an example of his thinking: withthree oscillators, they'd need a filter that could work with the abundance offrequencies the synth would be outputting, though Takahashi also seemedin awe of the way a diode-bridge filter creates resonance and distortion.

Putting the metaphysics of engineering aside, there's a definite limit to theamount of tweaking you can do with a hardware synth once you're off thebreadboard: Takahashi described the beginnings of the Volcas as "a kindof Frankenstein of different circuits that I wanted to play about with," wherehe and his team could home in on an overall approach. He said he kepttinkering with the Volcas long after would have been advisable, but atsome point he and his team had to let the circuits lie. And by all accounts,they've made the impression Korg had hoped for. Takahashi had set outto wire a series of boxes that could be used to make tracks, but he washoping to make connections you can't merely solder. "We wanted to justget that tactile feel back and into having something in your hands—just getpeople back into hardware," he said. "And we thought doing it analog wasactually the best way to do it now, because sonically it is so rich, it's verytactile, it's very kind of hands-on. You get attached to your hardware moreeasily that way."

For his part, Takahashi has forged his own relationship with the finishedVolcas. As he demonstrates the boxes for me, he doesn't come off as theengineer who made them but as another producer who's cutting his ownpath through the workflow. He and Sakamaki mentioned that they've beenmaking music together with the Volcas—mostly for fun, though it'sundoubtedly planted the seed for further development of the series.Takahashi said they'd like to expand, but not surprisingly, he's careful notto divulge any firm plans. "I get told off all the time for saying stuff," he toldme, no doubt conscious of the Korg press official who'd been tapping



away on a laptop a few feet away from us throughout the interview. "Youcan probably tell."

Testing for the series was all done in-house, but they had a few artists into play around with the finished products. "When I see these guys play it,"Takahashi said, "I give them a really brief explanation on how to use thesequencer stuff, but people—they just get instantly attached to hardware.They can feel how it's working, and they can be really spontaneous with itafter 15 minutes of playing around. That is the thing that I think is importantfor a piece of hardware—for people to be able to make that attraction andrelate to what it's doing, without really thinking about what parameters youtake. And I think that's the biggest appeal of having hardware."

Before parting ways for the afternoon, Takahashi moved the Volcas to theside and laid out about a dozen little circuits. Surprisingly enough, they



comprised a forthcoming Korg project in finished form: when assembled,it's a tiny, fully analog and fully modular synthesizer, built in collaborationwith the New York-based startup littleBits, who make snap-togetherelectronic modules. Takahashi arranged the chips in series and snappedthem together at their bright pink ends. The set comes with a little speakermodule, but he plugged the synth into a larger cabinet to show off itssurprisingly full sound. "We've got a modular upstairs," Takahashi said,"and it just feels great, you know, just to have it there. I like it, but it's justtoo expensive, and it's too condescending to be practical. This is our kindof answer to doing a modular synth."

As Takahashi mixed and matched the modules, he grew as excited as I'dseen him over the course of our time together. The littleBits collaborationmight not make a synth stable enough to be stage-ready, but I wondered ifit was the Korg product that best communicates Takahashi's nearlyinscrutable feeling of connection with what's happening behind the knobsof his Volcas. "I'm kind of hoping that if people who don't really know whatan oscillator is, if I just told them that you start with blue"—the powermodule—"and you end up with green"—the speaker—"and you dowhatever you want in between… I think seven times out of ten it won'tmake a sound, but if you try long enough and do ten differentcombinations, or do it ten different ways, I think that anyone can get intoshaping sound."

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