[ajxs]

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.

[klodolph]

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.