Again, this recombined existing concepts to create a groundbreaking instrument, but it was not what you would call affordable, so it didn't really follow in the footsteps of the M1 or the Trinity. Likewise, the Trinity's hardware would have been impractical before the mid-'90s but, once the barriers had been overcome, touchscreens and multitimbral effects began to be adopted.

The M1 was made possible by the emergence of VLSI chips and, once fabricated, these found their way into almost everything that the company made, from guitar effects units to recording workstations. Not only was the Trinity radical in the way that it combined these technologies, but the price - as it had been for the M1 - was remarkable for such a groundbreaking product.īehind the scenes, both of these instruments took advantage of advances in hardware technology. Then, in 1995, the Trinity introduced the combination of touchscreens, genuinely multitimbral effects, hard disk recording and digital I/O to the mainstream keyboard world. Nothing that it embodied was new: PCM samples, sequencing and effects had all been used in keyboards from other manufacturers, but the 'AI' architecture of the M1 did it more elegantly and more affordably than it had ever been done before. In 1988, the M1 defined what we call a workstation. Does their latest offering, the M3, live up to its pedigree?Ībout once a decade, Korg rewrite the rules for making music on affordable keyboards. Keyboard workstations have always been something of a Korg speciality, ever since they created the concept almost 20 years ago with the M1.

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