Category Archives: Korg M1

KORG M1 realtime control

I never thought I´d ever own a KORG M1. But when I recently found a used one at a very reasonable price I couldn´t resist. Now I am not really interested in its famous piano or organ sounds, or the internal sequencer for that matter. I rather want to explore its capabilities to produce drone like soundscapes. And for that, at least a little amount of realtime controllability would be apreciated.
Fortunately all relevant parameters are editable via SysEx. And as I found out the M1 reacts fluently to parameter changes. The only oddity is that the parameter numbers in the SysEx message depend on the structure of the program, and so double oscillator programs have a different parameterset than single programs. I therefore settled for a control set for double oscillator programs as polyphony is not an issue for me. The fact that the display of the M1 also jumps to the currently modified parameter is a nice touch as well…