These files are designed to complement my review of the Korg microX synthesizer in Electronic Musician magazine. —David Battino
The microX comes with a free travel case. It’s slightly too big to qualify as carry-on luggage, though. The white stripes are padded tape.
I discovered that I could hold a chord with one hand, press the octave-shift buttons, and add new notes with my other hand, getting pitches that are outside the two-octave range of the keyboard. Also note the warm string sound.
Pressing the Audition button triggers a riff to demonstrate the current sound. If you change a sound while the riff is playing, the microX will call up a new riff. Here I flip through sounds in the 16 Program categories (Keyboard, Organ, Bell/Mallet, Strings, Vocal/Airy, Brass, Woodwind/Reed, Guitar/Plucked, Bass, Slow Synth, Fast Synth, Lead Synth, Motion Synth, Sound Effect, Hits/Arpeggios, and Drums). Notice how you don’t have to let the riff play all the way to the end.
While a one-finger groove plays, I twist knobs for filter cutoff, filter resonance, arpeggio gate duration, and arpeggio length.
This beautiful Combi uses the arpeggiator to drive some glassy bell sounds.
One of my favorite Combis was this layered acoustic guitar and pad.
The microX sound ROM features a number of new "ethnic" samples. When layered in Combis, though, they often sound overbearing. This is a Balinese gamelan patch.
I had a lot of fun playing the bass splits, which layer a drum groove over a bass/pad split. Here are three in a row.