The Korg DW-8000 Synthesizer
The Korg DW-8000 synthesizer was released in 1985, along with its cheaper stable mate, the Korg DW-6000 synthesizer.
The DW-8000 is an eight note polyphonic hybrid digital-analog synthesizer instrument. By the time of its launch Korg had already begun a common trend in 80s synthesizer design of using numerical parameter access as with the Korg Poly-800 eschewing the heavily laden control panels of earlier designs. A more unusual feature of the instrument for the time was the use of sampled waveforms as the basic building block of sounds, and the inclusion of a digital delay effect.
This latter feature was one significant factor in the relative success of the DW-8000 compared DW-6000 released the same year.
The DW-8000 has been used by Juno Reactor, Depeche Mode, Dream Theater, Joe Zawinul, and Keith Emerson.
If you’ve used the Korg DW-8000, leave a comment with your thoughts!
Resources:
- Korg DW-8000 on Wikipedia
- Korg DW-8000 FAQ
- Korg DW-8000.com
- VintageSynth entry
- Video via thegarranimal:
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Tags: demo video, Keyboard Synthesizers, Korg, Korg DW-8000
I had a DW-8000 for a couple of years in the late 80s and there were some things it was very very good at. I used it primarily as a sampling instrument, but you could get super freaky with your samples.
I had a friend that had that back in '90 and he lusted over my M1. I should have just switched with him.