Korg DS-10

Ah man! Got back from FOWA on Friday night to find the latest love of my life lying motionless and unhassled in the front hallway.... oh god...

Nevermind. I picked her up stripped her naked and shoved her in the back slot of my DS. Then she turned me on....

Lovely piece of kit for the 25 quid it cost.

It's roughly 2 MS-10's and an analogue drum machine. For the muso techy (like me) it has most of what you'd expect. Each monosynth has a single ADSR, selectable HPF, LPF, BPF filter, 2 oscillators and all the lovely modes you'd expect (such as oscillator syncing, VCO2 offset) each oscillator is tri, saw, square or noise.

The drum machines 4 sounds are roughly the same. Nice.

There are 3 sequencers. 1 each for the monosynths and another which controls the 4 drum sounds.

Each drum sound or monosynth also has a patch bay allowing you to connect various oscillators or other outputs to various inputs... Eventually you'll understand what I mean!

There's no cross patching that is it doesn't seem that synth 1 can affect synth 2 in anyway - shame but then I didn't expect a Radias.

Then there's loadsa effects - 1 effect per drum sound and 1 effect that can be applied to a selection of outputs (synth 1 and/or 2, drums or all of 'em).

All of the above is replicated 16 times in each "song" as a 16 step pattern.... yeah.... just push the buttons and listen!

TBH The whole thing fits really nicely and I would give it full props except for the following which I'm find annoying (but not enough to stop me playing!)

1 - I can't name a song which makes it difficult to remember what and where I'm doing things.

2 - Number of songs is limited - maybe annoyingly so

3 - When in drum edit mode playback ceases except for the drum sound - annoying as I can't hear my newly edited drum in my mix.

4 - In keyboard mode I should be able to trigger the sound by clicking the keyboard

5 - In synth edit and synth patch mode I'd like a button that just played middle C. Otherwise I must go and create a sequence when all I want to do is edit a sound

6 - I can't copy sequences from one pattern to another (or haven't figured it out yet). DEEPLY irritating... seriously. Especially when ones sequences have got quite complicated.

7 - AH... that's enough for now... I've got to go and play!