Today marks the beginning of Superbooth 2019, the world's largest electronic music convention, held in Berlin. And with it comes two exciting new announcements from Korg: a standalone module version of its popular Minilogue XD (released in January) and the latest entrant to its Volca line, the NuBass Synth.
In our video above, Nick from Korg walks us through the new Minilogue XD Module—a keyboard-less version of the polyphonic synth. Have a MIDI controller you already own and love or just prefer module-based programming? This desktop unit can give you the same 4-voice polyphony, two analog VCOs, a digital multi engine oscillator, 16-step sequencing, tweakable parameters, and effects as the original, in a smaller and less expensive package.
Watch the full video to hear the Minilogue XD Module in action, and find more info about the synth's capabilities on our previous video for the Minilogue XD Keyboard.
The Volca NuBass is a fun-sized analog bass synth that uses Korg's miniature Nutube power tubes as the basis for its oscillator, giving the synth a rich, fat tone from the jump. Then, a second Nutube adds tube saturation and distortion to the generated sounds. From there, the signal path travels through a resonant ladder filter.
The result is a powerful synth able to produce squelchy, acid-y bass sounds like those found on the Roland TB-303. And you can program basslines across the built-in 16-step sequencer, which comes with multiple features designed to bring that classic bass synth flavor: the Accent function to emphasize individual steps, Transpose to step up an octave, and Slide to glide between steps.
As you can hear in the video above, this diminutive bass synth is capable of some truly bold sounds.