New Editors for the Korg DW-8000 and EX-8000 Available in Patch Base
by Chadwick Wood
January 2nd, 2020
Happy New Year! What better way to start off a new year (and a new decade, although some would debate that) than with new synth editors? Today we bring you an editor for the Korg DW-8000, a digital/analog hybrid keyboard released in 1985, and its rack-mounted sibling the Korg EX-8000. All available in the latest updates to Patch Base for Mac and iPad. The photo above (by Austin-based photographer Lauren Slusher) shows the DW-8000 I worked with, on loan from Stefan George, a kind Patch Base user that I recently had the pleasure of meeting.
It has 2 digital oscillators with 16 different single-cycle waveforms to choose from (also a noise source), and an analog filter and amp. It's a pretty simple affair: the filter and amp each have their own envelope. There's 1 LFO for modulating the pitch and/or the filter. And there's a digital delay that can sweeten and thicken things up. All of it fits nicely onto a single page for patch editing:
And with Patch Base's librarian feature, you can organize the bank of 64 sounds in the synth's memory as well. The synths don't have a patch naming feature though, so names don't get kept in the banks. But you can name your single patches within Patch Base to help keep track of things.
I'm trying to be more in the habit of making short demo videos, so that you can see Patch Base in action and actually hear what the synths can do. So here's a brief demo of the DW-8000, starting from an Init patch, shaping things up, and then exploring a few random patches as well.
Check these pages for more info and screenshots, and to download Patch Base: