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by klodolph 1593 days ago
Korg M1 was definitely the most popular. The Roland D-50 appeared around the same time, but it wasn’t as popular as the D-50. By 1992 you had a wide selection of samplers and romplers available.

Presets on the M1, D-50, Wavestation, JV-1080, etc all got used to death. A lot of the PCM samples were recycled from popular samples on older synths, dating back to systems like the Fairlight or Synclavier. Everyone had samples of the Jupiter, Moog, Synclavier, Fairlight, DX7, TB-303 and TR-808/909.
2 comments
pantulis 1591 days ago
That was one the cool mistery of those romplers to me (my first one was a JV-1010): they had the PCM tech that would allow them to sample real instruments like the brochures said, so strings, woodwinds a pianos were awesome, I could understand why. But what machines did they get to sample for the synth presets?
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ajxs 1593 days ago
A guilty pleasure of mine is that genre of YouTube videos showing where famous songs used the Korg M1's presets. It was absolutely all over the music of the 90s! When I was younger I unfortunately didn't pay these early romplers their due out of sheer snobbery. These days I'd love to play around with them.
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klodolph 1592 days ago
I watched the same videos, and ended up purchasing a small number of 1990s romplers in rackmount format, as well as a Yamaha FM module. It turned out to be a good investment—the patches often don’t sound realistic but they sound good, they’re very easy to use, and it’s easy to find a patch that I like. More modern synthesizers, softsynths, and DAWs seem like they have a ton of garbage, unusable patches with a million effects on them to show off how powerful their sound processing engine is.

The Yamaha FM module was actually my first hardware purchsae, and I thought I would love it a lot more—it’s pretty limited.

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