A Worthy Classic Made Even Better – KORG iWAVESTATION Review

The Wavestation has always been a complex, beautiful beast. Adam Holzman (of the Miles Davis group, et al) was one of my electronic music students at Occidental College back in the 1970s and it was he who introduced me to the Wavestation a few years after he graduated. At the time digital synthesis was all the rage, modualrs were dying out and even analog keyboard synthesizers were showing weak in the marketplace. Then along came the Wavestation. Adam was such a brilliant keyboardist, composer and synth-geek that I had to take his recommendation seriously. I was not disappointed. I found that the Wavestation was deep enough that even the nerdiest, modular synthwonks (such as myself) could love it. It sounded rich enough that it made several movie soundtracks better and it was playable enough to have been dragged onto countless stages. While it was most often found in studios, as a live performance instrument it gave us enough sythowhacky horsepower to do what would have required a mini-van full of synthesizers and other gizmos to produce only a few years before it’s blessed advent. The Wavestation was never a deeply interactive synthesizer, however. It was a set-it-and-forget-it, preset machine. Interacting live with its deeper sound design features in a performance situation was simply out of the question. The iWAVESTATION preserves ALL of the Wavestation’s features -including the great sound, excellent effects actually expands on the original’s playability, using the keyboard, mod and pitch wheels and joystick- by adding a Kaos Pad. You get al this while at the same time reducing the physical footprint of a Wavestation to something a bit larger than the average cell phone. Simply amazing. Furthermore, the interface is even better than any hardware version of Korg’s original WS (and there were several). The iPad interface allows a far bigger, more accessible screen as a means to get at the sound design tools and all the other synth-goodness inherent in the original Wavestation. The addition of the Kaos Pad interface and the inclusion of so many additional samples and presets and tuning files, etc. all add up to make this even better than the original. There are a couple of downsides to the iWAVESTATION. One is the inherent complexity of the synthesis engine; but that is also one of the Wavestation’s many advantages. Secondly, as a keyboard instrument ...well, just use a MIDI keyboard or controller. The on-screen keyboard, like all other iPad virtual synthesizers, is nearly useless. Its okay for use during sound-design and not much more. I DO wish that Korg would take advantage of the iPad screen as a performance surface and add a keypad interface - something like what you see on the AniMoog and the TeraSynth and Thor and so many others. But set this puppy up right with a MIDI keyboard and a good sound system, flip over to the Kaos Pad/Joystick screen and I swear you can actually FLY with this thing. The iWAVESTATION is so good that I sold my Wavestation EX so that I could buy a big, fat, new iPad Pro 12.9 incher to go beyond where the EX could take me.
Review by BozoToo on KORG iWAVESTATION.