There was a famous slogan in the punk era. "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band."
Let's fast-forward a decade to the late 1980s. How could we update that slogan? "This is a Korg M1. This is a copy of Zero-G's Datafile One. This is a second-hand Akai S950 sampler. Now come up with a band name, but you don't need to actually form a band, just come up with a name. You will be the band. You, and samples."
You might also need an ADAT recorder and an Alesis Quadraverb. And possibly an Atari ST with a cracked copy of Cubase. Maybe a little mixing desk to tie it all up. And some old records, although Datafile One covers that. This being 1989 all of the aforementioned would have cost you several thousand pounds, but it was all you needed to make an actual chart hit. To be an actual, bona fide pop star. To appear on Top of the Pops, standing awkwardly behind a keyboard while dancers did their thing in front of you.
You might also have wanted to hire a really good singer. And a model, who would appear in the video, but not on the record. You would have one, maybe two top ten singles.
Then it would all go wrong. Your first album would reach #14 in the charts on the back of the singles. Your second album would spend a week at number sixty. The record label would void your contract. And now it is 1993, and tastes have changed. You're baffled by the new sounds of trip-hop and jungle and big beat. You can't catch up, but it was fun while it lasted.
But let's talk about the Korg M1. It was launched in 1988, but it took a few years to become ironic, and then it had a second wind. Now, whatever your opinion of Apple, you have to admit that the company has a wide range of interesting musical apps for the iPad and iPhone. Near the top of the tree is Apesoft's iVCS3 (pictured above). It's a software recreation of the impenetrable-but-fascinating EMS VCS3. There's also Moog's Model D, which recreates the Moog MiniMoog, and Olympia's Patterning, a drum machine with a novel circular interface. And iM1, a modern interpretation of the Korg M1.
Modern-ish, because it was launched in 2015, but Korg continues to update it, and it works fine with modern versions of iOS. As of 2025 it sells for £29.99, but it's occasionally on offer. For that money you get a simulation of most of a Korg M1, with the original presets, plus some more presets from the expanded M1EX, and an in-app option to buy more presets from a bunch of voice cards.
Which isn't a particularly appealing option, because the key to the M1's success was the iconic range of sounds that came with the original keyboard. Extra sounds are nice, but do you really want a batch of b-list sounds from a 1990s digital synth? Neither do I.
What is the Korg M1? It's a sample-based synthesiser with a built-in sequencer and multi-effects. For many years it was the best-selling synthesiser of all time. Why was it so popular? There were essentially two reasons.
Firstly, it was a miniature studio in keyboard form. It had an eight-track sequencer that could play eight separate instruments at once, including drums. The architecture was built on a pool of samples, including guitars, electric basses, pianos etc, which meant that it was one of the first synthesisers that didn't necessarily sound electronic. It could do rock or orchestral arrangements, not just techno.
It also had a built-in multi-effects unit with a mixture of reverbs and delays - standard stuff at the time - but also distortion, EQ, an exciter, a phaser, even a rotary speaker simulator. As a result the M1's presets sounded unusually slick, as if they were part of a finished record. Korg's preset designers didn't just splash the effects onto the sounds arbitrarily, they knew how to make the built-in samples sound good.
The second and most important reason was the M1's range of preset sounds. As a synthesiser - as a means of generating new tones - the M1 was very limited. Nowadays it's often called a ROMPler, because it was really just a sample playback unit with a bunch of waveforms stored in a built-in ROM chip. The synthesis engine had a bank of four megabytes of 16-bit, 44khz samples that could be layered and fed into the multi-effects unit. There was a simple non-resonant digital filter, although it was more of a muffler than a proper filter. As if to compensate for its stiffness the envelopes were unusually complex, partially to enable a simple form of wave sequencing and partially to disguise the lack of real-time control.
But very few people minded the limited synth engine, because the preset sounds were fantastic. For the first time, a relatively affordable keyboard synthesiser had lengthy, professionally-recorded 16-bit sampled presets, instead of compressed little sound snippets. The traditional instruments were impressive enough to use as stand-ins for their real-life cousins, while the sci-fi sounds were perfect for ambient techno. As far as I can tell literally the first sound on The Orb's "Back Side of the Moon" is a Korg M1, specially the Universe preset:
Unfortunately the M1's sounds quickly became overused. I don't know exactly which instruments Livin' Joy used to make "Dreamer", but to my untutored ears the whole track sounds like Korg M1 with some drum samples layered on top:
Beyond the house piano and heavenly choir the M1's other popular preset was a boop-boop, boopy-boopy organ sound. It was bassy, but it also had enough treble that it didn't get buried by the drums. It was used prominently on The Nightcrawlers' "Push the Feeling On", which is another record that seems to have been created entirely with a Korg M1 and drum samples. The M1 also coincided with the Nintendo SNES, which used sample playback for its music, so a lot a SNES games had M1 samples because the composer owned an M1.
Apropos of nothing here's a recording of Japanese ambient radio station St. GIGA, which might not have any M1 on it as far as I can tell, but it reminds me of the era (nb there's a really good track at the 24:30 mark):
On the whole the M1's mixture of clean samples and digital reverb have a slickness that got old quickly. If music was a big circle, the Korg M1 would be on one side, and Johnny Cash's American Recordings would be on the other. Even in the field of dance music it dated badly. But some of the synth strings and pads have a timeless quality, and it has a lot more character than the General MIDI keyboards that followed it.
But what of iM1? It doesn't have the sequencer, presumably taken out because there are better options. I admit I haven't tried sequencing iM1 with my iPad. Instead I used Logic running on a Macintosh. The iPad has terrific integration with a Mac. It acts as both an instrument and a digital audio input, so I don't have to run a cable from the headphone jack to my audio interface. When hooked up in the fashion iM1 essentially operates as a virtual instrument within Logic, but running on an iPad.
As with the Korg Volca FM there's a certain pointlessness to iM1. Korg also sells a VST version that can run directly in a sequencer, although at $49.99 it's not an impulse buy. For the record I paid £12.99 for the iPad version, which is slightly more awkward to use than the VST version and doesn't save any money if you don't already have an iPad. Compared to an actual M1, however, iM1 has a much nicer interface, and real-time parameter control. It has limited support for automation.
As a proof of concept I recorded the following piece of music using the iM1, plus Nils Schneider's free VST recreation of the Kawai K1. I was going for an early-90s SNES soundtrack / synthesiser demo song feel.
The Kawai K1 was a blend of M1 and Korg Wavestation. Each patch could be created from four samples layered on top of each other, mixed with a joystick in real time. The samples were 8-bit and very muffled, and there was no filter at all, and some things still baffle me. There's an LFO, but seemingly no way to assign it to anything. A complex modulation section, but no way to assign the envelopes to anything except volume, which is a shame because the amplitude modulation feature would have benefited from pitch modulation of the amplitude source. But it's free, so I shouldn't grumble.
While playing with iM1 it struck me that if you didn't grow up in the 1990s its sounds probably don't come across as cheesy and dated. And for an early ROMPler the recording quality of the samples is surprisingly good, so in isolation the M1 doesn't sound all that old-fashioned today. And perhaps you do want to evoke the sounds of Culture Beat or Whigfield.
Anything else? As with the original keyboard iM1 is eight-part multitimbral, but it only supports a single stereo output. This is one thing the original M1 has over iM1, because the original M1 had four separate audio outputs. It has limited support for automation, which is undocumented in the manual, but it will respond to MIDI control codes. The M1 was 16-voice polyphonic with dual-sample single patches, whereas iM1 raises this to 64 voices. On my first-generation iPad Pro it never slowed down, but then again the application is quite old and is at heart only playing back a bunch of samples.
As mentioned up the page Korg sells extra sounds as in-app DLC. The two expansions are £2.99 each. I'm sure there are some gems, but a large part of iM1's appeal is the M1's ironic, original set of preset sounds. The Korg T1 was probably fantastic, but what does it mean in 2025? The M1 has meaning, that counts for a lot.
