Korg TR61 61-Key Synth Workstation Review
By : Learn About Us on with Comments 5
With its highly acclaimed Hyper Integrated sound engine which has popularized the Triton keyboard the newly launched Korg TR61 61-KeySynth Workstation features this sound architecture. Also included is a 64 MB ROM with many sounds. The TR6 includes a portable secure Digital card storage and USB MIDI.
A full featured 16 track sequencer is housed in a slim case makes the TR6 look sleek and attractive. This instrument certainly endears some of the qualities of the Triton keyboard to some extent and the sound quality in every respect is superb. The Korg keyboard comes complete with more than 1000 sample and percussion sounds.
The TR6 includes an appegiator for creating arpeggios or exploring counterpoint to get your creative juices flowing. The 16 track sequencer offers you the capability to create the most demanding piece of music without running out of space.
I actually heard of a guy who went through three divorces because of his infatuation with Kork products and in particular the Korg TR6. Now talk about devotion and love for a particular brand of keyboard!
Get the Korg TR61 at Amazon
Filed Under: Korg Keyboards
I have owned a Korg TR61 synth for about 3+ years now, and I can honestly say that this is a great keyboard for beginners or for pros. I’m a pro producer and composer, and this synth is more than flexible for meat and potato type arrangements, or whatever.
The sequencer is easy to use, but because this is based off of the Triton Le model(s) verses the full Triton models, there are a lot of embedded sub-menus to access certain functions. It does not give you a touch-screen lcd option. As such, you use buttons and sub-menus for a lot of advanced midi and sequencing functions. That can be a little frustrating to get used to at first, and try to figure out. But it’s not so bad after you use it for certain functions a couple of times; like copying measures, copying tracks, inserting fx, assigning the arpeggiator, etc.
What do I like most of all? The midi/usb functionality. Absolutely no midi latency issues I’ve experienced when using it with Nuendo (Win XP), and used as a controller for soft synths/samplers that I use, like NI Kontakt 2.
I also bought the sampling option for it. I have not taken full advantage of that yet, but it really rounds out and completes the TR61 as a complete workstation for music production. Not to mention that you can save everything you sequence or sample to an SD Card. And you can load samples you’ve already saved from a computer or whatever from SD Cards into the TR61. I’ve tried both and it works without any issues. There is a SCSI option if you want to go old school, but really, save yourself the problem and just go with the SD Card for backing up data.
Ok, let me say something about the patches/sounds. The TR61 has some sounds from the original Triton and from the Extreme. Just about most patches in it sounds very good to me. Some of the sounds that I think could be a little better (in regards to variety, not quality) are the drums. The drums sound good, but you can tell that they used the same internal waveforms for several different drum kits. In other words, just about all of the drum kits, with exception of the percussion kits have 50% of the same drum samples. An alternative is to load your own drum samples into it, but of course to make that easy you need to have the sample card installed, which you of course must purchase.
Synths are pretty good for the most part, but nothing stellar that a good vst plug-in can’t accomplish on it’s own, and with more variety. That is unless you program your own, which you can certainly try. I think the leads are fairly decent, but could have better variety available. Again, try programming your own. Pads are VERY nice! Arps are very good. Filters are good and much variety and many options for modulation control.
Bass patches (synth bass)are VERY good, with a lot of good variety for different styles. The electric basses are not that bad, but what I’ve done is combine two different bass patches together to get a meatier bottom. Works wonders.
EP’s, pianos, and other keyboards are great, strings are VERY GOOD! Organs are actually very good as well.
There’s a lot more I could write, but then I would basically be writing a full review like Keyboard magazine. Instead I’ll end with this comment. I think for a bread and butter synth, this is a steal! In fact, you could make out very well with this synth considering that it’s consider “old” already with newer models released by Korg. But if you can’t make a beat/song with this synth, then don’t blame this keyboard. I’ve scored part of a film documentary with this synth, and it worked in SPADES!
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Dan Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
DAS, thanks for that great review!
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hi dan, great review ! congratulations!
I am with serious doubts and i know that you could help me, they are offering me for the same price a korg tr 61 and a korg trinity pro 76 with expansion card(sounds included)
and some disks with korg sounds.
What would you choose? the trinity is 8 years older that the tr 61…best regards
[Reply]
Dan Reply:
January 4th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Hi,
I would go with the TR61. Electronics being what they are, you are always better of with the more recent. Also the technology is probably better overall.
Dan
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Great keyboard when it worked! My TR76 died about 1 year ago after 3 years of light use. The music store’s techs decided the main board needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, the high cost of the part combined with the labor resulted in it not being cost effective to fix.
I emailed Korg customer service and never received a reply.
I won’t be buying another Korg product!
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