One of the big announcements before the show was Korg’s new clone of the ARP Odyssey. It was up there with the Moog Modular and Sequential Prophet 6. So I had to see and play this one for myself.

Like most of Korg’s recent reissues of classic analog instruments, this version of the ARP Odyssey is about 80% the size of the originally. I’m not sure what it is with Korg making things “just a little smaller” than the original. But it did have the sound of the original – I tried, somewhat poorly, to play some lines from Head Hunters. And I was happy to see that had the original industrial design, including the Helvetica-style red lettering on black background that remains very distinctive. It would be interesting to play this along side my vintage Octave CAT. At just under $1000, it’s even possible one day.

Another new offering from Korg this year was the MS20-M kit, a kit variation on the MS-20. It was paired with the new and very compact SQ-1 CV sequencer.

The MS-20M has no keyboard, but that’s not much of an impediment as one can control it via external CV.

At the small end of the spectrum there was the LittleBits SynthKit, a collaboration between Korg and LittleBits. We actually have one of these kits at CatSynth HQ.