The 2600 FS and 700 FS have great keybeds.
Also, the MS-20 FS keyboard is not bad at all.
For starters, it is much better than any vintage beybed out there (like 10 times better than my vintage Rolands for example ).

Why wouldn’t they?
Look at Moog successfully charging 6000€ for a 1 voice Minimoog reissue (while Korg still “only” charged 4000€ for their latest 2600 FS batch)…

This has at least 156 pots (some weird custom switched pots), 71 or so 6.35mm jacks, enough internal components for 147 filters, 147 envelopes, 147 VCAs, 36 oscillators and whatever divide down technology to get to 147 voices, 3 resonators (3 bandpass filters each), 3 LFOs, 24 toggle switches..........even with transistors and op-amps apparently being "dirt cheap" that is all going to add up when you are using multiple hundreds of them.

I know the internal cards pretty well as I own a Korg PS3100.

Plastic nuts?

Since I saved up some cash

can't wait to get my brand new Korg

NTS-1 MkII

WHAT did you see coming??

My 700FS has a really nice keyboard

My goodness, the whining… If you're into synths and music tech, this is a great time to be alive.

The range and depth of offerings out there is excellent. The perma-whinge-fest that is GS is just some dismal alternate reality.

Whoever thought there would be a re-issue of this beast? I'll never be able to afford it, but I'm very glad Korg is doing it.

Unaffordable for me, so I'll stick with Cherry Audio's PS plugin.

I'll be at NAMM this Thursday and I hope to see it at the Korg booth.

Three layers, an instrument that might make me consider selling my Jupiter-8...

...I'm out, barring someone approaching me with an offer I can't refuse. Otherwise, I can wait for the M.

Though this also means that divide-down tech is back in production, I could go for a KARP Omni. And this also sets a price benchmark for Roland shall they ever consider analog reissues (ha).

And I thought I was done with GAS.

Seriously though, what an unexpected announcement. Even in the genre of vintage reissues it feels somehow fresh.

As I see it, Moog is a much different company. They are based on their legacy and that's what they sell. A piece of the history they have created. They have changed, but they never were an affordable music technology company for the masses. Their range of products is mostly limited to the subtractive analogue synthesis technology they have created before 50+ years.

Korg seems to be experimenting with products. They have their classic synths but they never stood behind one hero person with 2-3 historic products. They are not considered "a premium brand" no matter how many expensive re-issues they make or how many memorable products they have created the previous decades. They are not counting on that.

My point is that Korg nowadays recycles and invests too much in old ideas instead of keeping their real milestones in production and making them even better. I'm not sure if a PS-3300 is more useful than an MS20 FS, a better sounding Opsix / Modwave with a classic real analog filter, or an advanced Prologue. Affordable instruments that have a character and last longer.

They have kept Microkorg in production and re-introduced King Korg because they can be useful and they probably use the same engine. I get that. A new PS-3300 though... it looks like a waste of budget because there are other products which they can improve. They could have updated the Minilogue XD to make it sound like a Prologue or re-introduce the Prologue for example..

You're right - I underestimated the number of pots - those buggers indeed get costly quickly.

I guess what I wanted to say was that it wouldn't be something like 49 times more expensive than a monosynth.
Considering the prices of Korg's "FS" mono synths, that announced $13k price seems fair.

Wow! Was playing my PS-3100 for hours last night, thinking how unique the tone is. And how rare these are, not many have had the chance to explore this instrument.


With all those patch points, there are so many different ways to play and configure it. For example, with 12 oscillators and hold, you can set it up as a mono synth. And detune the C# and F# with C and F for a nice lead tone. Control it from a remote keyboard, ribbon, joystick, drum, just about anything. So much fun to play and setup. Not sure many realize how versatile these are with the patching ability, and some outboard CV gear.
Can't imagine having three of these as in the PS-3300!
Probably won't be able to afford.it though. Only paid $850 for.the 3100.

Oh, yet another reissue.

Over the past week I've suddenly gone from being disgruntled at Korg in recent years for not listening.. to loving them again

G.A.S. is hell. I could make this happen. It be both delightful and painful at the same time.

Is this divide-down? From what I understood, it has literally three oscillators per key, quite a monstrous approach to polyphony!

Anyway, I agree that this is totally unexpectedly and REALLY brave from Korg! Much respect to them!

The temperament tuning knobs sure suggest it.

Having all the cheap synths is nice. But it's also nice for there to be unobtainable luxury synths to dream of and lust after.
Korg have introduced a little romance back into the game. Well done.

I was going through the specs and they say it explicitly:

"3 Layers: The PS-3300 consists of three synthesizer units (PSU-3301) and a mixer & utility section (PSU-3302)
Three independent oscillators, plus multiple filters, envelopes and amplifiers for every note on its keyboard, for a total of 147 synth voices of raw analogue power"

So every key has essentially three single-oscillator monophonic voices.

and I just noticed: in addition to obvious updates like MIDI and USB, they added preset memories!!!

I always thought this was the most significant addition to the 700FS and it was somehow underestimated, people didn't comment that much about it. But adding it to this monster is even bigger.

MicroKorg, Kingkorg, NTS-3, opsix wavestate and modwave modules, and now this one...what have they been taking at Korg these days?!? Somebody stop them before they take over the universe!!!

The original PS series used divide down oscillators so for example the PS3100 had 12 oscillators and used divide down circuits to get to 48 notes. It still had 48 filters, VCAs, and envelopes for each voice.

The PS3300 is essentially 3xPS3100 so that had 36 oscillators.

One other limitation people might not realise on these is that you cannot play notes outside the range of 48. You can move the 48 notes up and down octaves but you cannot, for example, play C2 and also G7 at the same time as they are more than 48 notes apart. So you can play midi notes 1-48, or 49-96, or 97-144 by changing the octave switch.

I am speculating that the remake will work the same way as the original (but I might be wrong on that).

I wonder though, with that experimentation and recycling whether they are as a modern company with young engineers relearning how to do analogue in the present day such that instead of re-releasing a DV-800 (though we definitely can't discount that idea now) they have the nous to actually build upon it.

You might say that the Mini/Monologue were enough and they don't need to know how to redo MS/700/Arps etc but I guess all those and this behemoth have enough charm that they still may want to utilise some of the circuit design.

Then there's the elder Japanese businessman 'just for the lols and we'll write it off because you've been such a credit to the company' element.

But yh, relearning the past to build the future even better. Unlike Roland with their outsourced token gestures.

This would make a great 200-in-1 experimenter kit but much much better than the
one I got from Radio Shack and experimented with as a child in the 70s.

This synth oozes fun IMO.

There is a pile of legacy IP that Korg is sitting on that I would *love* to buy reissues of. I've put my money where my mouth is and bought an MS-20 FS, Odyssey FSQ, 700, and a 2600M (after losing out on the 2600 pre-order). I would day-1 buy a Maxikorg, Minipops, Omni MkII, Polyphonic Ensemble, etc. This? It's interesting, but I'm not in a rush to drop $10k or whatever it ends up costing for how it sounds or what it can do.

I'm definitely happy for the people who've always wanted one of these though. Hopefully everyone who wants one can get an allocation.

If I win the lottery this year, it will be mine.

For $13.000 , I would rather buy a car !

I wish they would re-issue more affordable classics like the Polysix or Mono/Poly instead of these $15,000 halo products for dentists in LA.

Divide down tech is generic, easily done using flip flop or binary counter ICs. The only component that might be rare nowadays is a top octave generator chip, which takes a high frequency master clock and generates the 12 notes for the top octave. The PS3100/3300 use 12 separate oscillators for the top octave so this chip isn’t needed for this synth. The remaining octaves are simply divided by 2 using flip flops or similar circuits.

Sub oscillators on modern synths often use the same principle. Use a flip flop to divide the incoming signal by 2, producing a square wave. Wave shapers can be used to create other waveforms.

Korg and Moog are similar in many ways.
In terms of scale, Korg might be twice as big as Moog, but it’s the same order of magnitude. No comparison with Roland, Yamaha or Behringer.

Also, Moog have had affordable synths since long ago: Rogue, Prodigy up to their modern counterparts LP, Grandmother and little modules.

Also Korg always had a wide range including cheap and expensive : the PS-3100/3200/3300, the Trident, … and even in the digital realm the Oasis some years ago. And they were the ones who kickstarted the reissues ten years ago with the Odyssey.

To me it makes sense to cover a wide range: from mass distributed cheap (Volcas…) to low volume/high margin built on order units (which solves the assembly chain issues: as seen recently with the 2600M being assembled on the same line that was used just before by the 700 FS)
I am personally very excited by this PS-3300 and its original features and huge polyphony

This also can be easily done with an array of binary counters - because that's what those chips were internally.