| Product: |
Korg - Triton |
| Date: |
29/09/04 (1005 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Awesome sounds, Now an industry standard
Disadvantages: Very complex, The finish gets dirty quickly
I have owned my Korg Triton now for about a year and a half. I paid £1,699 for it which is the most I have ever spent on any musical instrument!
Was it worth it? Well in a word yes. This keyboard is quite simply awesome. The amount of admiring looks it gets at gigs is testiment to the reputation it has quickly gathered.
I reckon this thing is pretty much the industry standard now. Whenever I watch music programmes like Jools Holland or Top of the Pops you see the Triton pop up time and time again.
Anyway onto some of the features this workstation has. You get 66 fully touch sensitive keys, a joystick and a touch sensitive expression bar which is good fun to use! The interface you use to input your commands couldn't be more user friendly. You have a large back-lit touch senstive screen, a keypad and a selection wheel. All this means easy navigation between the various screens.
The Triton has plenty of impressive sounds. I'll list a few of my favorites but I still discovering new ones even now!
The combination patches are well put together and give some really nice ambient sounds which are nice to drop in as intros to songs.
The electic piano patches are reckoned to be just about the best available on any workstation keyboard at the present time. The Club Electric Piano sound is probably my favorite of them!
You get some nice Lead keyboard sounds to play with, ranging from modern dance style sounds to some real retro analogue ones.
String sounds are also well catered for on this workstation with individual instruments and full string sections avaible. I have used these a lot, especially the Component Strings patch.
I can't say I have used the guitar or brass section sounds too much as I am primarily a guitar player and also don't tend to use brass sounds too much in the music I write.
The kits on this keyboard are very good. These range from standard kits to more exotic stuff like drum 'n' bass kits and a kit patch designed by Tricky.
Of course all these sounds are fully editable and you have plenty of free slots to put your user-edited sounds onto.
I think my favorite feature on the entire keyboard is the "Arpegiator". Basically this is fantastic tool that allows you to quickly and easily produce and loop arpegiated sequences. You can do anything from Tangerine Dream to Goa Trance stuff with this wonderful tool. I use it an awful lot in the music I write as it just sounds so good!
You get a 16 track sequencer on the Triton and I have found this more than enough for my song writing needs! You can save your songs onto floppy using the drive provided and I have found that you can get a large amount onto a 1.44 mb disk as an average song only uses up about 50K.
Also included with this workstation is a sampler, this I haven't really used to much but from the little messing around I have done with it, I found it very easy to sample and then cut and loop to your heart's content. You really need the optional hard disk to be fitted here as keeping lots of samples on floppy disk is just a pain really!
The keyboard is obviously fully midi capable and you also get a nice amount outputs on the back. These you can send sounds to individually, which can be handy for live and studio work if you want to separate your sequenced tracks. I use a live drummer so I have a click track on all my sequenced tracks and this goes out of one of the outputs to headphones, so only he can hear it live.
Even after having the keyboard for over a year and gigging with it extensively I am still finding new things on there and still learning as I go.
In conclusion then I can fully recommend this workstation to any serious song writer. I think it has been replaced now so you should be able to pick it up for quite a bit less than the £1,699 I paid for it.
Thanks for reading!
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