Korg Oasys

Korg OASYS is the most ambitious synthesizer workstation unveiled by Korg until date. It is hailed as the culmination of the Korg technology as it encompasses physical modeling, sample playback, DSP effects, MIDI sequencing and multitrack audio, KARMA control and everything you can dream of in a music production studio. With OASYS, you can start from scratch and get the final output without switching to other instruments. It allows tracking, mixing, mastering and burning the final project on an audio CD completely within its bounded scope.

OASYS stands for Open Architecture Synthesis studio and the core concept of Korg OASYS is its expandability. The list of features of OASYS makes it an undisputed king of keyboard synths. Some of the notable features include 172-note polyphony, tons of hands on controls wide variety of designer timbres, good expressive capabilities and limitless programming potential.  The Korg OASYS features a tilting 10.4-inch touchscreen color LCD. The system is further complemented with 40 GB hard disk, a gigabyte of RAM and onboard samples, which are more than the size of one gigabyte. The instrument also offers you the capability to add more of these system components.

Impressive Features:

The stock voice architecture of OASYS is HD-1, which is the latest avatar of Korg tried and true 16-bit, 48 kHz PCM sample playback engine. The sound emitted by this engine is pristine and clear and the modulation capabilities are equally impressive.

The unique feature of HD-1 sounds is they can have mono oscillators or two stereos both having independent signal path.  Each oscillator can layer two multisamples and create four multisamples for velocity splits and cross fades.  The sample selection provided is enormous- 300 sound effects and more than 100 synth waveforms.

The OASYS has additional synthesis engines called EXi Expansion Instruments. OASYS provides two EXi algorithms namely called AL-1(virtual analog) and CX-3(drawbar-organ). A third EXi algorithm STR-1(pluck string simulation) has just been released.

One of the creative stimulating features of OASYS is its wave sequencing capabilities. You can play a series of multisampled waveforms in a sequence to create rhythmic phrases or evolving textures. OASYS features all original waveforms of Wavestation’s legacy collection.

OASYS provides 185 effect algorithms including wide range of mastering quality dynamics, 3-band EQ to Toneworks guitar-amp modeling. The Korg O- Verb, one of the favorite stereo reverbs is also a part of OASYS

The well-designed user interface makes the operation of Korg OASYS quite easy. The built-in help is useful to learn to get around the instrument and delve deeper to explore the advanced features.

Good: Impressive sound, well-designed user interface, Flexible synthesis engine.
Bad: No balanced outputs, only two balanced inputs. No multichannel digital input, No USB connection to computer.