Arguably, Yamaha never did manage to put the fun into FM (coming closest with the DX200 groovebox), so you have to admire their plucky countrymen at Korg for having another crack.
If you’ve ever seen a photo of the huge Jellinghaus programmer (with maybe 200 knobs and a bunch of switches), you’ll appreciate how many FM parameters lurked inside that brownish DX7 shell. Thanks partly to the rise of affordable samplers, FM’s reign was relatively brief, but it could have been so different. Its impact may be hard to appreciate now, but at the time, frequency modulation (FM) synthesis was an icicle in the heart of fuzzy old analogues that couldn’t deliver a convincing tubular bell to save their lives. This was the year MIDI was launched, but it also marked the appearance of Yamaha’s hugely successful DX7. Their latest contains a surprise blast from the past - specifically, 1983. When it comes to supplying small, affordable and intuitive items to today’s electronic musician, Korg have a firm but friendly grip on the market. When it comes to FM synthesis, Korg’s little Volca is thinking big.
The Volca FM’s front-panel livery is certainly reminiscent of its Yamaha forebear.
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