Korg S3

The S3 was Korg's 1991 attempt to apply the M1 workstation approach to rhythm and sequencing, but it never attained anything like the success of its more famous keyboard sibling. Paul Nagle explains why.

The Korg name isn't exactly synonymous with classic drum machines. Neither Korg nor Yamaha ever acquired the uncanny instinct for success in the kickin' department possessed by fellow countrymen Roland. One of Korg's better efforts in rhythm was the S3, which was sadly miscast as one of those do‑everything instruments that you just know won't.

The success of the M1 workstation had been a welcome shot in the arm for Korg and, in typical Japanese fashion, they applied the same philosophy in creating the S3 Rhythm Workstation. It took almost two years after the S3 was announced for it to finally hit the streets and when it did, in the early months of 1991, it was accompanied by a whopping price tag of £899. This was serious money for a drum machine, though not, perhaps, so outrageous when you realise the scope of the S3's ambition: a merging of sequencer and drum machine, with twin internal effect processors, SMPTE sync, two MIDI outputs and an impressive range of programming options.

Description

Encased in sleek black plastic, the slimline and classy S3 has much in common with the M1, in terms of its appearance. The controls are distributed tastefully: a single volume slider, alpha dial, four soft keys, shift, page and +/‑ keys, plus standard sequencer transport buttons, all spin an illusion of thoughtful design. Eight plastic velocity‑sensitive pads (with eight different velocity‑response curves) let you tap in your rhythms or play along with an existing pattern or song. A button switches banks between pads 1‑8 and 9‑16 of the current drum kit and, despite being very noisy (like a clunky old computer keyboard), the pads are actually quite responsive and playable. One gripe is that there is no dedicated tempo control, which I think is unforgivable on a drum machine. Instead, you have to use a combination of the shift key and the pad button, and you can then tweak tempo using the alpha dial.

A small 2‑line x 24‑character backlit display is the window on a rather labyrinthine operating system. Operation is rarely intuitive, and even after several years' use of the S3 I still feel a little intimidated when I need to stray away from familiar territory.

In addition to stereo outputs, Korg have thoughtfully provided four individual outputs for those times when the onboard effects aren't enough. Staying with the generously‑endowed rear panel for a moment, three card slots allow two PCM and one data card to be plugged in, thus boosting available sound sources and sequencer memory. Two footswitch sockets can control start/continue and pad bank switching, or even act as one of the pads (with a flat velocity response) — such as the kick drum, for example. Twin MIDI outputs and a MIDI input fill the remaining space.

Spec Check

So what makes the S3 tick (and, indeed, kick)? Spec‑wise all is peachy: samples are 16‑bit, polyphony is 12 notes, timing resolution is 192 pulses per quarter note. A maximum of 30 songs and 100 patterns can be stored internally, along with 160 timbres (80 programmable and 80 preset) and 20 drum kits (10 user, 10 preset). This all sounds healthy, until you realise that the overall memory is just 33,600 bytes. A single note uses 4 bytes, so the S3's overall note capacity is 8,400 notes. This is fine for a drum machine, but for a real‑time sequencer intended to be the heart of a MIDI studio, it's positively stingy. Waggle some MIDI performance controllers and watch those bytes disappear! A RAM card can hold a maximum of 31K of extra sequencer data (or less if the card is formatted to hold additional drum kits) but in practical terms this memory restriction meant that the S3 was a closed system as far as sequencing was concerned.

MIDI

The S3's two assignable MIDI outputs get the thumbs‑up from me. It's useful to send, for example, MIDI clock (or MIDI Time Code) via one output and note data via the other. Each output can function as a combined (soft) Thru and Out simultaneously. Perhaps with the limited memory in mind, Korg added comprehensive MIDI filtering options to enable the filtering of control changes (not selectively, I'm afraid), program changes, pitch‑bend, aftertouch, and even note or velocity data. Up to four drum kits can be played at once, on up to four MIDI channels, and can be switched during performance via MIDI program changes. A separate channel controls remote selection of the 16 internal effects patches. Unfortunately, the S3 does not respond to MIDI Volume control (CC7).

Jack Of All Trades, Master Of One?

The S3 takes a rather novel approach to its drum sounds, by splitting many of them into two: the initial hit (drum head) and the decay or body (drum shell). Quite how this is achieved isn't totally clear, although I suspect that some kind of resynthesis technique was used. However it was done, you're given ample tools for tweaking the rather conservative selection of kicks and snares and the excellent toms. The final drum sound is made by recombining any two of the 75 internal waveforms. You're not forced into building a bass drum from two bass‑drum components — you can pick a transposed snare head and tom tom body, perhaps with some downward‑sweeping auto‑pitch‑bend for good measure. As well as the 'separated' drums (typically bass, snare and toms), there are a number of full samples of other instruments, from hi‑hats and cymbals to latin voices, with a few synthesizer waveforms thrown in too. To be honest, little of the raw material is remarkable in itself, but with experimentation it's possible to create some unique sounds with the S3.

An S3 drum kit contains 16 percussion instruments, which may be allocated to a single MIDI note, spread over a range of notes, or may even overlap. The two timbres of a drum voice each resemble a mini‑synthesizer, with their own waveform, 8‑stage envelope, velocity response, output routings, auto‑bend, tune and transposition. In fact, the only thing missing is a VCF, but the S3 was spawned in that particularly dark period of history when Korg had mislaid the magic formula for the resonant filter.

The S3 was sadly miscast as one of those do‑everything instruments that you just know won't.

Each waveform may be played normally or in reverse, to further extend the S3's sonic palette. By setting appropriate velocity responses, you can switch between or layer any two samples, for a respectable semblance of acoustic feel. If this isn't enough for you, there's a 14‑entry modulation matrix with such sources as pitch‑bend, modulation wheel, aftertouch, note number and velocity, which can effect pitch, output level, auto‑bend (amount and speed) and several stages of the amplitude envelope too. There's one thing to beware of, though: if you edit a timbre you have no way of knowing whether it's referenced in multiple drum kits; innocently altering one of the user percussion patches can quite easily transform that killer kick transient in drum kit 5 into a rather cheesy cowbell! It's the age‑old, frustrating problem which haunts many synthesizers, and I've learned to make complete and regular SysEx dumps of my S3's data, to get around it.

Pads Overlap mode determines whether a pad is polyphonic (decaying sounds overlap new hits) or monophonic (decaying sounds are cut off by new hits). By way of two exclusive instrument 'groups' you can ensure that certain sounds will never play together, as the S3 will not allow sounds from the same group to play at the same time. Typically, you'd disallow instrument combinations that a real drummer couldn't physically play, assigning open and closed hi‑hats to one group, and rimshot and snare to the other, for example. Finally, the S3 allows you to prioritise certain pads in a kit, by defining them in the reserve group. If you never want a cymbal splash to be cut off by a tom roll, this is how you could do it.

The S3 takes a rather novel approach to its drum sounds, by splitting many of them into two: the initial hit (drum head) and the decay or body (drum shell).

Effects

The onboard effects were praised in reviews at the time as a great innovation for a drum machine. Sixteen onboard effect patches, each containing two effects in two configurations, allow some pretty flexible routings. There are 28 effects to choose from, including stereo reverbs, chorus, flanger, delay, exciter and EQ. A range of compound effects, such as delay/reverb, delay/chorus, and EQ/flanger, means that you can vary the processing of up to four individual instruments in a kit if you need to. You can even process the two components of a single drum voice separately. With such flexibility, it's a shame that the effects aren't more impressive — the reverbs are nowhere near as lush and warm as on, say the M1 (one of my all‑time favourite reverbs). Nonetheless, they are usable.

Another downer is that the output level is so low that EQ must be set to maximum on both effect slots just to ensure a decent signal! This rather robs you of the ability to make subtle timbral adjustments onboard, and usually means that at least one of the available effect slots is occupied by the exciter (which is only mildly exciting, but better than nothing).

Sequencer

The S3 can operate as an 8‑track sequencer, with each track playing internal or external instruments, or both. Tracks may be allocated to either (or, again, both) of the MIDI outputs and may be delayed by up to a quarter‑note against other tracks. The maximum sequencer polyphony is 32 simultaneous notes.

As you'd expect, recording can be in real or step time, and the usual method of assembling short patterns, then chaining them together to form songs, works well enough. I wouldn't want this to be my main sequencer but for tapping out drum patterns it's certainly adequate, especially when some of the real‑time frills are employed — rolls (with their user‑defined rate) and flams are ideal for perking up a flaccid performance.

In song mode, the S3 can be used to lay down a timing track to tape, and can sync to this SMPTE signal for song playback. Frame rates available are 30, 29.97, 25 and 24 frames per second, with a programmable song start time.

On paper, the S3 seems quite well tooled up on the sequencing front, with the usual copy, insert and delete functions, plus velocity transpose, pitch transpose, velocity compress/expand, quantise and swing operations. Sadly, these make permanent changes to the data and thus discourage use. Had Korg included an Undo function, it would have made a world of difference.

Conclusion

If you buy an S3 these days, it's likely to be for its sounds. Just possibly, you might use its SMPTE features (I confess I never have), but I can't see anyone making more than superficial use of its sequencer. I don't subscribe to the 'everything‑in‑one‑box' approach to hi‑fi, and I don't think it works for musical instruments either.

What Korg produced with the S3 was a complex, fiddly device (the manual contains four pages of possible error messages — a clue to just how complex this beast is) which nevertheless can be coaxed into producing a broad spectrum of usable sounds. It's not the drum machine to choose if you want a bunch of familiar dance sounds (the Roland DR660 might be a better all‑rounder) or indeed a simple rock kit (the Alesis SR16 seems to have this market cornered).

So why do I like it? I guess because I'm starting to find that older, rather quirky gear can have value because it leads you in new directions. Sometimes it's better to buy a cheap second‑hand instrument that was once top of its tree than something new that stretches your budget today. With the rate of discount of new instruments, the chances are that any old S3 you pick up can be passed on again with little or no loss. The S3 may frustrate you and it may never give you that perfect 909 bass drum, but spend a little time programming and its charms start to shine through.