Unbeliavable as it might seem, last week I finally traded my Alesis Micron for a MicroKorg in wonderful condition. Why, you might ask? To tell the truth, it just never clicked between myself and the Micron. How much I wanted to like it, I just didn’t. It has a really wonderful synth engine, it’s sturdy, and I like the “bubble gum package” design – but nothing matters if it sits in a corner, unplayed.

I think the main problem for me was the inaccessibility of the instrument. Everything had to be edited through the pigeonhole display with a single knob that will twirl itself to death one day. This includes setting up the three stubborn soft-knobs that on my Micron were set as default to the three least usable parameters for every sound. Sigh.

The MicroKorg has only four voices, it looks ridicolous, and it has an almost-not-usable keyboard. But to tell you the truth – it rocks! The vocoder is amazing, it sounds rich and full for what it is, and it’s quick to grasp and edit.