A Phoenix from the flames? Sort of...

It has been two years since I concluded my Micron - Patch a Day project. I love the Micron, and no doubt will go back to it at some stage (or maybe even an Ion, one day...) but back in March 2010 I sold my much loved silver and red box and bought a Novation A Station. A great synth for tweaking but sadly I don't have the room to keep a rack of gear anymore and so, after only a few short months, it too moved on to pastures new.

Although I have a number of soft synths which I love messing about with (especially Reason), I very rarely sit down and get stuck into some patch creation; I dunno, just too may distractions I guess (and as my soft studio is laptop based it isn't always set up). Bottom line is I missed a hardware synth, there is something very seductive about sitting down and using a user interface designed solely for the purpose of making noises. And sometimes (occasionally!) very nice noises too.

And so I bought one. A new synth.

So what have I chosen? What have I plumped for over and above another Micron? I can almost hear the yells of Judas but yes, I got a MicroKorg (!). I have a few reasons for choosing the Korg over another Micron, or something like a Novation K Station (the only other serious option I considered in my budget), as follows:

• It runs on batteries (so can grab it while I have a spare half hour sat about on the sofa)
• Although not as easy as synths with a non matrix UI, editing is a bit easier than the Micron (especially away from a computer)
• The simpler architecture means that copying / sharing patch settings can be done via a few lines of text rather than .sysex files (for posting on blogs for example)
• The simpler architecture also means that creating patches is not as daunting

And with my new synth comes a new project, similar in nature to Micron - Patch a Day... MicroKorg - Patch a Week! I really struggled to create a new patch every day so I have ditched that concept for a more realistic timescale of a new patch every week. Patches will generally be posted in simple text format although I plan on posting videos, audio files and maybe .prg files too if there is a demand (bear in mind I run OSX though).

So there you go. I appreciate a lot of you won't be able to follow my sounds on the new blog since the hardware is so different but I hope a few of you will read what I am getting up to, and possibly even try things out on the more powerful Micron as we go along. Feel free to even post your results here, the more the merrier!