The sound quality keeps getting better, it’s easy to understand, and it provides the features that composers and players need. The keyboard workstation as currently constructed just. You might think that I’m giving the manufacturers a bit of a kicking here but, on the contrary, I have great sympathy for them. I’m not saying that there have been no great synths released in the past few years - in my view, the Waldorf Quantum and the Yamaha Montage have both advanced the cause of the keyboard synthesizer - but as yet there’s no sign of a new workstation that takes us to the next level in the ways that the M1, Trinity and OASYS did. After that, there was the not‑so‑simple matter of making things lighter and more affordable but, since the launch of the Kronos in 2011, progress has slowed to a crawl. Have you noticed how little the keyboard workstation has evolved in the past decade? After the Korg M1 introduced the underlying architecture in 1988 there was an arms race between the major manufacturers, with Korg again taking the lead in 1995 when the Trinity introduced multitimbral effects, and yet again in 2005 when the OASYS stuck its expensive fingers up at the competition by introducing multiple synthesizer models and making everything, well. Korg’s Nautilus puts much of the functionality of the Kronos into a far more affordable instrument.
