IPad app review Korg iMS-20 Analog Synth

Firstly, despite the title of this app, this is of course not an analogue synth of course, but it is a very good simulation of one, in this case, the Korg MS-20 (from 1978-1983) monophonic synth. It feels very analogue and really, its close enough to it that it justifies the use of the word in the name. The original device has been used by artists such as Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Goldfrapp, OMD and Aphex Twin....so this app has a lot to live up to.

What this app is, is a simulation of an (old) analogue synth (and a sequencer) by one of the most recognised names in professional music. Given that heritage, its not surprising that it isn't the cheapest of apps (I bought it for £9.49 but I see its since gone up to £19.99 - worth waiting for a price drop again perhaps). When you run the app, you see a loading screen showing what the genuine old synth looked like and it is quite intimidating, looking more like a home electronics kit for kids than a musical instrument, with only the piano like keyboard a clue that it is in fact a musical instrument (in fact, much much more than just an instrument - more on that later)

While I have no personal direct experience of the original synth, there are plenty of examples of how it sounds and what it can do out there, and based on what I could find to compare with and based on the statements of genuine professional musicians, this app makes an amazingly close simulation of that original kit.

That is both it's strength and weakness. The original was quite clearly a monster of a machine - capable of the most incredible creativity, but also a mind boggling array of options and technology that can be certainly quite daunting.

Take a look at the initial screen you are presented with when running this app for the first time. Having seen a photo of the original in the loading screen, the similarity is clear, and OK, the keyboard at the bottom looks relatively familiar and inviting, but the array of tiny knobs, buttons and bazaar yellow patch cables is initially quite off putting. Certainly, the menu at the top of the screen with it's multiple sections, each with many many sub screens full of additional knobs and switches is hardly intuitive...and yet, given a little while, it really all works very very well.

That initial screen is actually a simplified view of the assortment of options around just the main synth part of the device. For example, tapping the keyboard button at the top, hides the pop up recording keyboard to fill the screen with more of the options available. All of this is still available with the keyboard displayed too, but you have to scroll the panel to see it all then. On this screen, the top bank is what is "recorded" (programmed is probably a better term) for the current "pattern". each pattern can have a different synth sound, a different set of notes/parameters for the notes and a different drum pattern. A "song" is made up of up to 256 separate patterns.

Before getting to making songs though, its worth noting that you can also zoom in on the settings for the synth, which makes tweaking all those knobs a little less fiddly but not by much. The synth is a collection of 2 "Voltage Controlled Oscillators" (VCOs), with a selection of waveforms and parameters for each. The 2 main oscillators can be combined, along with a frequency modulator, and shaped with various filters (Highpass and lowpass) and shaped by an envelope with attack, decay, sustain and release along with pitch and numerous other parameters. These settings alone are enough to produce a bewildering array of very different sounds, although even after much playing, I'm still struggling to really understand how the different sections interact and as a result, most sounds are arrived at with a lot more trial and error than intention - but that is part of the joy of playing with the thing - the feeling of exploration and discovery.

Thankfully, unlike the original, when you do find just the settings you like for that swooping laser sound or crashing base, you can save all the knob position and patching routes to load again whenever you like. There are also a number of pre-defined settings you can load to get you started. I can only imagine that musicians first getting such kit back in the 70s with no such luxury would have had to spend a lot longer getting familiar with the thing before they could get anything like the sounds they wanted :)

This is only the beginning of how the sounds of the synth can be tweaked though. Zoomed in, the patch panel is a little more obvious as the tiny white "print" can be read, but its still a magic black box without understanding how the different elements work together and what each does. Again, after a lot of playing, I'm still only scratching the surface of really understanding any of this part, but it's clearly very powerful in how the wave forms going through the synth can be taken out and redirected into additional/different (virtual) circuitry. Thats the key I think to getting any understanding of what is going on - remembering that its all about voltages and waveforms, some of which become triggers for events and clocks for other bits of the system in a complex feedback loop. One thing I think the app can do that I'm not sure how the original would have managed is that it only lets you plug the output signals into places in the circuits for inputs. Heaven knowns what happened on the original of you tried feeding a voltage back in where another voltage was being produced!

The top section of the synth has 16 separate "notes", each with 12 parameters arranged in 4 sets selected by the white buttons on the left. The first bank are the "note", the "octave" and the "length" of each note. Length isn't what it sounds like however as the way the synth plays a pattern is at a fixed rate for each "note" (fixed meaning a rate set by another dial on a different screen), but length is the nearest term I can think of. The other banks of settings include volume, pan, and 3 parameters than can be selected to tweak (almost?) any of the settings in the dials below individually for each note. This works simplest for things like the high and low pass filters to give a characteristic "sweeping" type sound.

The next screen to look at is the drum pattern settings. Anyone familiar with an old drum machine will probably recognise the way of setting a drum to sound or not on each of 16 beats in a pattern. This synth has up to 6 different "drum" sounds (7 channels in total with the synth track), with each drum being effectively a synth in it's own right with all the same settings and options. So for each drum sound, you can select to edit the sound and you are presented with a very similar screen to the synth screen. Here, I've selected to edit the drum pattern in more detail rather than the sound (as the sound editing screen is really so similar to the synth screen). This shows the dual X-Y touch pads that can be used to interactively play or "record" edits to the various parameters instead of the piano keyboard.

Next up is the master mixing screen. Each of the 7 channels can have a different overall pan applied (on top of the individual note pan settings), and an overall volume. You can select to mute any channel individually, or choose "solo" to mute all other channels except that one. There is also a master effect which can be selected from things like reverb, delay, chorus and flanger. This is again on top of the same choice of effect which can have been applied to each channel individually earlier in the sound chain!

Songs are made of a sequence of patterns, and this is the screen for doing that. Here, the slider chooses which set of 16 places for patterns in the song is selected for the buttons below. Each button can be assigned to one of the 16 patterns on the pads below that (by clicking a button and then tapping the pad to assign to that slot). There are 2 special options too to either loop the song when the sequencer reaches that slot or end. The pads can also be "played" in real time, either changing the pattern being played as soon as a new one is pressed or sync'd to the track seamlessly. There is also a mixer on this screen for each channel and a BPM setting (which is what changes how quickly each note plays back on the synth and drum screens). You can choose to play the whole song or repeatedly play the selected pattern (until a new one is selected) using the menu at the top.

Last few things to note (excuse the pun), are the ability to save songs (with all the patterns/synth settings etc) This bit is the nearest to looking like a standard iPad app. It integrates with Soundcloud for sharing your creations with others (my efforts with this app and others are here http://soundcloud.com/sputuk to get an indication of what it can sound like). There is also a community section on Soundcloud where everything everyone shares with the app is collected. One great thing is that depending on how people choose to share their creations, you can download their original rather than just the resulting song so you can dissect it and tweak it yourself to learn from how they produced certain sounds and effects - very useful for learning how to get what you want from the app :)

Finally, this is the global menu for tweaking a few settings of how the app behaves (such as where the text pops up showing you the value of a dial when you're adjusting it) and also "bouncing" your song or individual patterns - which is the musician term for creating a final mix down of the sounds into a single file (in this case, wav files).

So, enough of how the app looks and works - I have only included so much on that because I think it's the only way to convey how complex, flexible but also bewildering this app is. The important things are, does it work, what can it do, and is it worth the money.

Does it work? Absolutely. I've not had it crash once and despite the non-standard look and feel of the UI, it all works really well once you get used to it.

What can it do? Well, just about anything you're likely to have heard in the form of electronica music. Dance, trance, pop, dub - you name it and you can create a suitable set of sounds and beats. There are lots and lots of examples on Soundcloud besides my few (search for iMS-20) which show the huge range of styles and sounds it's capable of. What I haven't even touched on here is how it can work with external midi equipment, making your iPad the hub of multiple controllers and keyboards acting as the synth and sequencer while using real full sized velocity sensitive keyboards and drum pads. Korg have a whole set of such items as well as those from other manufacturers, and these can be used through the camera kit thanks to the latest iOS4 update which includes CoreMidi support. This is something I certainly intend to investigate further. NB if you are thinking of this option, there is a web site that details which midi kit works through the camera kit and which doesn't. Most it seems does, but some which need to draw power through the USB will need connecting through a powered hub. I think there is also scope for someone to create a camera kit adaptor that allows charging the ipad at the same time. There is also a new device, the iConnectMIDI due to be released Q2 2011 that acts as a "midi hub" for the older 5 pin din devices as well as multiple USB midi devices and up to 2 iPad/iPod/iPhones at the same time. The videos of this kit working with apps such as iMS-20 as well as external hardware synths and multple simultaneous keyboards/pad (with up to 5 people jamming together on just an ipod and an ipad) shows just how advanced this stuff can get.

Is it worth the money? Well, at less than £10 (when I bought it) for a synth that sounds like something costing well over £1000 for vintage versions of the original (manuals for the original seem to cost as much as this app!), and with the ability to use it professionally for recording or live performances especially with the addition of midi controllers, I'd have to say yes. It's amazing fun to play with and despite making music so far that I would usually really hate to listen to, I'm having great fun making the music. Yet another example of how the myth of the iPad only being suitable for consuming content has been blown out of the water :)

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