The Korg Poly 800
In this video series, I’m highlighting some cool synths from the 60’s-90’s, as detailed by the excellent YouTube channel 8-bit keys. Today, we have the Korg Poly-800:
The sound of the Korg Poly 800, with its cassette tape interface (plus restoration details)
The cassette tape interface on the Korg Poly 800
One of the more interesting features of this synth is that it has a cassette tape interface to load in digital sound patch information via analog tape.
Back in the day, there was no plugging in of a USB drive to transfer digital files. Instead, in order to load sets of sounds onto this instrument, you had to record the sounds of the 1’s and 0’s in the digital files onto an analog cassette tape, and then play that cassette into the instrument to load the bits directly into the instrument’s memory. The sound of the tape is somewhat similar to how an old-school dialup modem sounded.
You could buy different cassette tapes from the manufacturer that would let you load in different sets of sounds. Those original tapes are almost impossible to find in working order nowadays.
A lot of the built-in original sounds on the Poly 800 have a really natural feel to them, where the attack and release times are similar to what you’d get from playing an acoustic instrument, while the tones used are obviously super synthy and weird.
I tend to like a lot of Korg’s stuff for that reason; a lot of their vintage style synth sounds strike a really interesting balance between natural and artificial sounds, where it’s not quite one or the other.
This particular instrument has a lot of professional options, like the ability to make your own custom patches from scratch. So if you can find one in good working order for a decent price, you might be able to get a lot of mileage out of it.
As always, be sure to watch from the beginning! There’s some great restoration work that’s been done here, and they really had to dig deep to find a copy of the original Korg factory patches, then load them in via the cassette interface.
