Keyboards – Korg MS20

When I was hired by the showband, Sensation, one of the criteria was that I had to play keyboard bass because they never had a full-time bass player. At the time it was common for band members to switch positions and many band leaders figured that bass was the least important of the instruments and could be given to whoever had a free hand – meaning me.

I couldn’t afford a MiniMoog – $1495 in 1979 dollars – so the music store guy talked me into a Korg MS-20. Unlike the Moog, which had three oscillators and a rich, wooden cabinet, the Korg came in black and to get the proper sounds you had to plug jacks into the phono plugs like a telephone operator.

After experimentation I got, what I thought was, a decent bass sound and froze the blueprints. I even copied the settings down in case they were knock off kilter during moves. The Korg MS-20 was a sister to the MS-10 Vocoder, which had a microphone so you could do those ’70′s electronic voices like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica :”By your command!”

(Illustration from www.99music.se)

Our band leader had a MiniMoog and he had to tune the three oscillators at every break. Not me. The two oscillators on the Korg were tuned the first day I got it and – I checked – stayed in tune until the day it was stolen (Along with my Kustom 200 amplifier). The sounds that it generated were so good that there are digital recreations of the patches (sounds) on today’s synths. Korg has even reintroduced a modern version.

One of the memorable songs I played the bass on was Late in the Evening by Paul Simon. I have tapes of that band playing that song and the sound is amazing for “a cheap Japanese synth.”