Korg EA-1 Electribe

come on! This thing is so hands on. You can't walk past it without just having a quick tweak. I have had it for a couple of days and am creating some really nice sounds. It is all there in front of you and with a midi keyboard you spend all your time kicking around new sounds rather than scrolling through deep menus. The presets (a bank and b bank) all sound kinda day-glo and hands in the air but the d'n'b give you some good base bass to start fecking with. VERY EASY

Two parts blah blah you probably know the stats. The little rubber buttons are no replacement for a keyboard but then when you are somewhere without your k/board they are completely lovely. Shame about the distortion but it does give some nasty edges to bass drones so i'd rather it was there than not. It midied up fine and is such a godsend compared to my jupiter 4 and polysix. I wonder why i ever mucked around with pre-midi noisy synths when something dirt cheap like this can do so much.

It bleeps squeaks and hums all the sounds quite nicely. I was unsure wether it would give me what i want but just a wee bit of playing around and its replaced a much bigger heavier box'o'analog. And all for NZ$400, which is like US$200! And i'm glad to get such clean sounds no noise floor!

I got it second hand, the box is light and plasticy but so what. don't soak it or throw it across the room and it will be fine i'm sure. The guy i got it off hadn't really touched it but i did notice on someone elses ER-1 that the knobs can get a bit loose. treat it well, it never did you any wrong. And i will use it live as it has no drives or delicate bits.

I've never tried. I found the web to be the best resource for mods and upkeep of other bits of gear, and i checked this list of reviews before i drove three hours to look at and buy this little beauty.
If something goes wrong, its probably happened to someone else and they've written all about it on a web page somewhere, and besides, korg are busy writing manuals in crazy talk. Attention KORG! employ me and i'll translate your manuals into logical speak.

So cheap, less than a third it's retail and its hardly used. I don't think i'll find one this cheap again but i would replace it unless i could afford an MS2000R. It sits in with my juno2 and drum machines very nicely, doesn't take up too much space and when sampled is absolutely killer. I've tinkered with lots of unreliable older gear and am sick of it. This thing is so much stronger with nice stable sound and easy to use. I have written three tunes (using it and other gear) in one night all seriously thanks to the EA-1. I get sick off all the analog stroking as i like crisp sharp sound and this thing can really cut through.

This machine makes all of them look like shit. The best unit to fall out of the mothership hands down.

The unit is basic when it comes to features, but thats what I want. I wanted analog ms-20 sounds with oscilators, and basic effects to tweak in real time. Finally a company understands what this genre of music is about. Its not about polyphonic, filters, unwanted effects, its about tweaking sound on the fly and creating a thick synth bass groove that gets you movin. Any one who complains about this box shouldnt be making music, just stick with a sampler and Emimem tunes.

This is basically up to you. If you like generic techno you wouldnt change a thing, but if you want some funked out space porn, start tweaking. You know what its fun doing it thats why I bought it. I use to own the rm1x what a peice of shit. The mc 505 sounds like elevator groove music. Generic and watered down. Everyone has to remember back in the day when beasties, new order, joy division, bauhaus, cure, public enemy, these are the bands that started it all, and for $300. you can basically do everything they did back then for a fraction of the cost, and less equipment. This is not a synth with keys its almost beiggining with no end and thats exactly what electronic music is about.

Korg has been around for years. If it breaks they will fix it.

If you need customer support on this you better buy ACID pro 2.0.

My overall rating on this is.............. Ill let you figure it out.

The Electribe has to be THE easiest synth to use. It was designed that way, so that anyone from beginner to expert can make music with it. Pretty much just hit record and start playing the mini keys and twisting knobs (one at a time, however). If you want to make something that sounds decent really fast, this is what you are looking for.

This is a monophonic two part synth, with one part sent to the right channel, other sent to the left. Not a problem except it is not possible to make pads hardly at all. The effects are limited, but effective and very easy to use. Modifying them in real time produces some interesting sounds. It is not velocity sensitive, which tends to limit some of the expressiveness. Distortion is either on or off, not adjustable at all. The sequencer automatically quantizes what you play, and also features step record. Basic, but it works good. Overall, a very limited machine. In fact it is mostly for the beginner just getting started in music making. I have had the EA-1 for a few months, and would like to move past its basicness and get something more advanced and professional sounding.

I can't say I have heard an analog synth that sounds like the Electribe, or one that the Electribe sounds like. The machine has its own unique sound, to be sure, but there are much better analog emulators out there. It works great for fat basses, leads, and some interesting sound effects, and has a niche in the studio, but does not lend itself to a wide range of electronic styles. For the price, it is quite good as a beginner instrument, and has some very crunchy sounds. The biggest downfall of this instrument is that it is a low cost digital emulation of analog. Which means that on certain knobs (most notably filter cutoff and oscillator 2 pitch offset) it is impossible to get a smooth sweep as you turn the knob, because it is digital. If you turn the filter cutoff very slowly, you will not get a long smooth sweep. Instead it will be stepped, as the knob jumps from one value to the next. Likewise with pitch offset, you cannot get a perfect fifth or third offset, and the pitch jumps as you turn the knob, sounding somewhat like the pc speaker in an old DOS game. There are indeed many sounds you can get with this unit, but they are mono (unless you copy one part to the other for both channels), and not-the-greatest-quality sounds. The Electribe just doesn't sound really professional unless you record and modify the sound on a computer, which is time consuming. One other drawback: The internal clock is slightly slow, which means that unless you have the instrument synced to an external device's clock, it will quickly fall behind and lose sync.

I have had no problems yet. Manual is a breeze. I have not used this in gigs, but for a quick slamming sound, it would work very well played live.

N/A

I probably would not have bought this if I had played with it first, simply because it is too limited for me. It is not a bad machine at all, but you do get what you pay for. If you are a beginner and want some pretty wicked sounds, it is perfect for you. But if you are serious about making professional music, you will want something much more advanced. Overall a very limited, but very good sounding synth, if used with taste.

Well, first off I think that some of the presets are pretty cool, others are not so spectacular, but the one thing that they do is give you a good idea of what you can sqesze out of this box. It's great that you can get rid of the presets, but I'll keep them on there for awhile until I get this thing figured out. I had a Boss DR-5 that had the worst presets in the world, I hated them and I couldn't get rid of them. I was listening to them one day and just said, "This thing sucks!", and the next day I traded it in for the EA-1. Good choice, no regrets.

Editing patches is easy, even without the controller keyboard hooked up to it. The step sequence programming mode should be simple for anyone who's ever used an 303-type sequencer, I have no problem with it anyway. I haven't tried it with Cakewalk yet.

The manual is alright. Some of the stuff is a bit vague. I find that if I just mess around with the EA-1 for a few minutes I can figure just about anything out on my own. I've only had it for two days now and I pretty much have it cased.

It's a two part monosynth, which is fine by me. I don't know what some of the reviewers were expecting when they bought this thing. Did they think it was going to be a damn Supernova? I don't think so. This isn't going to be your only synth. At best it will provide a foundation to be layered upon or for making some tweaked-out sound effects. The bottom line is you're not going to get too many lush pads or chords out of this thing. (You can fake some chords and pads occasionally, but you're better off leaving that to your other gear that is actually made for doing that type of thing.)

They keyboard is 16 rubber buttons at the bottom of the box. It's not so bad, they're a bit squishy, but they do the job. If you don't like it, go out and buy a cheap controller keyboard. They're good enough for doing some simple realtime or step sequencing when you're sitting on the couch with the headphones on.

Pretty good effects, if you don't like the one-setting distortion, run it though a dist pedal or something. Experiment with it! I ran it though my Line 6 POD and the tube emulation warmed the sound up quite a bit, plus giving me access to some more effects. The whole reason why I bought this box is so I could actually try some real-life stuff with it. Sure, I could run Rebirth through some amp sim plugin in Sound Forge, but you get so much more feel from tweaking real knobs. I also know that you could get a midi controller, like a Phat Boy or Native Instruments 4-Control, but I don't want to be in front of the damn computer all day long, you know?

This thing sounds great. Okay, so I've never even seen a real analog synth, but when I turn tweak the filter bank just right and get a totally screeching, twisting, morphing sound I find it hard to believe that the sound is all virtual. It's more like a guitar feeding back and making a whole lot of droning weirdness.

Well, this thing is obviously best suited for some type of electronic music. Dance, industrial, whatever.

No velocity, no aftertouch. And that's fine.

It's only plastic, and the sound skips when I shake it. That worries me a bit.

I just know that they don't support warranties from outside the States. Not good.

If it were lost or stolen, I'd buy it again, I think. Like I said, I've only had it for two days.

My other gear is all computer-based, so I guess that you could say that the EA-1 is my first synth. Hardware synth, anyway. I also use Sonic-Syndicate's Orion (Great program, rival to Reason, and cheap too,check it out! http://www.sonic-syndicate.com/), Cakewalk, and a variety of other soft-synths/plugins.

I've played a lot with Rebirth and found that I didn't like it all that much. Maybe it's just the fact that I don't like using the mouse to tweak onscreen. You can't beat hands-on tweaking, that's for sure.

I wish you could motion-capture multiple knob movements without hooking it up to a software sequencer. But despite a synth's limitations, you can always come up with some cool sounding stuff (hopefully).

This box has impressed me so much that I'm almost surely going to get the ER-1 as well when I get the cash. I think that for the price they are very solid machines, great for beginners and an excellent addition to any setup.

I've been using the Korg EA-1 synth for quite some time now, both for its sequencing, and synthesis capabilities; I use it to drive external modules when playing live and to generate "backup" sounds. I was quite impressed with the features on the EA-1, as I was with the entire Electribe series instruments. Kudos to Korg for not including a dreaded preset ROM. THe Manual for the EA-1 is clearly illustrated and informative, but I was very disappointed not to find a full MIDI implementation chart. Luckily, I later found one on the net, but never found much use for it since most of the parameters are tweakable from the front panel.

The EA-1 features 2 monophonic 2 oscillator parts. You can copy one to the next for massive "unison" patches reminiscent of the old Korg Mono/Poly. The onboard effects are great, the delay nice and lo-fi with motion sequencing and the chorus/flange hybrid having a surprisingly wide range. When coupled with mad ring-modulation and the onboard distortion, it is possible to achieve some very dramatic results. I was also happy to find an audio input to "feed the unit to itself", but was a bit annoyed at the output routing; the "mix" output being a loaded down (passive?) coupling of outs one and two. It would have been nice to have the machine's effects come out in stereo like the delay of the Electribe ER-1 drum box.
The onboard sequencer alone is worth buying the unit for, as you can use it to control extenal boxes, and the keyboard-like arrangement of buttons is also useful when travelling light.

I was impressed with the EA-1s overall sound, save for its filter, which sounded a bit weak to me. This situation can be improved by running the unit through an external filter bank or by feeding the unit back into itself, but for all you CAN do with the unit, this is a minor gripe. Some of my colleagues manifested their upset at not having access to an envelope generator, but I assume this omission has to do with the logistics of going from one patch/pattern to another, as it would be difficult and costly to either morph or set up separate DSPs to handle the overlaying of one patch to the next.
I found the convenience of being able to store 256 patches and sequenced patterns far outweighed the envelope problem.
Also, I would have enjoyed some sort of pitch wheel or assignable ribbon controller for pitch-bending, as you can do so (with pleasing results)from an external source, but not from the EA-1 itself.

Although the EA-1 is of "light" construction, it is well designed enough to stand the rigors of the road. I did however, have to open mine up a couple of months back to realign the alpha wheel which kept skipping values by two. This excursion into the innards of the EA-1 proved to be very interesting, as I got to see Korg's clever settup of grounding tabs (preventing hum and other nasties) and the tight but clean PC board layout. I also noticed little plastic posts were added to the shafts of the pots (knobbies) you are most likely to tweak madly and I have since decided to add my own (providing I can find them) to insure further road worthiness. To those of you who say the Electribes are built cheaply, consider how long the silver R----d boxes have been around and that tey too were made of the same petroleum derivative.

I have voided my warranty. I did not send in my warranty, and no, I have never had the pleasure of dealing with Korg. If I ever got to meet Mr. Mori, the genius behind the MS-20 and as I believe the man responsible for bringing Korg back (after a long absence in which he founded Zoom, Mr. Mori returned to Korg a few years back, just before they started coming out with cool products again...) I would shake his hand and thank him for years of amazing synths.

I'm really big on the Electribes right now, either for live or studio work. I reviewed the ES-1 sampler a few weeks back and forgot to mention they should have made them in yellow, but then again, yellow is "chi"; four; death in Japanese, and this is bad luck. The EA-1 is a nice deep blue color and has brought me nothing but good luck. The entire Electribe series is what I've been dreaming of since I first put my hands on a R----d MC-202 back in 1986. If you're curious to hear what I'm doing with the Electribes, you'll have to wait until my next album comes out. http://www.davidkristian.com

I was able to be makin some crazy sounds after about the first five minutes it was out of the box. This is definitley an easy to use (yet versatile) box. The only thing that took some work was figuring outhow to get the knonbs to transmit midi to my sequencer.

I mostly use my ea-1 with several other synths in cubase. However, when I first bought it my midi setup was pretty much dead due to some bad power supplies, and it was great being able to just sit down with this box and a pair of headphones. The sequencer is pretty easy to use, but I was hoping for a copy of the tb303 sequencer. And of course you cant always get what you want, so Im still happy with it. The manual is pretty helpful as well; just one wuick read through and I had the whole thing pretty much figured out. The rest is just trial and error.

I must say that this box is veeeery cool. I say 'cool' because although it is wonderful for what it is, it doesnt have that much practical use (at least for what i do). To get some truly great sounds, you have to spend quite a bit of time getting to know it. Ive read a few reviews by people saying that they could get maybe 2 or 3 sounds out of this machine, and to them I say you must not be very creatve. If you actually take some time to work with it, the possibilities are endless. Just listening to the presets you can get a great idea of how versatile it is, from speaker blowing sub-basses to snarly distorted leads to strange analog percussion-ish noises. I love them all!

I dont gig with it, but if I did I could depend on it. I havent had a problem with it since I bought it.

I hope I never need to find out...the manual is fine though.

I had been looking at this box for a long time before the price dropped and I finally caved in. I think it is one of the best bang-for-the-buck synths I have ever bought and used. Not only that, but it looks cool, and its so fun to play around with. But dont confuse it with a toy for making dance music! All you dj-wannabes should probably just keep on looking for one of those all in one boxes until the fad passes. The ea-1 can get down to business if you treat it right. So if youre not one of those analog perfectionists that has to everything a certain way, and youre willing to use some creativity, get this. You wont regret it. And if you do, take it back, but dont whine about it endlessly. Different people like different things!

This thing is incredibly easy to use. A monkey could figure it out.
The manual is good and explains everything you need to know.

well the features are limited but I gave it a 7 because its so cheap. I
wish it had normal MIDI assignments for parameters like cutoff and resonance, like
CC 74 or 71, etc. instead of NRPN. Also wish there was a "fingered portamento" option
to get tb-303-ish slide effects. not including a "glide" feature was really dumb, korg,
what were you thinking?

Someone said they thought ReBirth sounded better. Heh, get an ear, kid!
This thing can made a decent range of sounds, checking out some of the presets
will give you an idea. I've gotten some great aggressive leads out of it and
some cool spacey tones as well. It would have gotten a higher rating if the
filter wasn't so steppy. FX are decent, nothing to write home about but they work.

yeah seems 100% reliable so far, never had a problem.

If it was stolen, I wouldn't go buy another one. I would shell out the extra cash for a
Future Retro 777 or maybe look at a Syntecno TeeBee. $350 seems like a lot for this, especially when
a Virus Rack or Waldorf MicroQ cost around $700 and give you many more voices and much better sound
quality. I do like it though because its easy to use and fun to write
patterns on. Cuts through a mix well. It makes a great partner to the Yamaha RM1x for a quick, on-the-go
live setup. Check out "Into the Deep" & "Short Circuit" on my mp3.com site if you're interested in
hearing the EA-1 & RM1x together live.

It's a piece of cake to edit the tribe! Every paramater is editable hands-on. No freakin hidden menu's on this baby. The knobs feel solid and the volt controlled filters are 12 db and scream!
If you're familliar with synthesizers you don't even need a manual.

2 part multitimbrality, 2 voice polyfony is enough for me since I make Aphex Twin techno. Midi works very,very reliable. The sequencer I use is Cubase so the thing on-board I don't know about.

No realistic sounds of course. Just warm or screaming analogue sounds. That's why I bought it. It has cool blip's and leads. With the onboard effects (chorus,flanger,delay) you can beef up the sounds a little.
However I do use a multi effects processor on the side. Reverb is necessary because otherwise the tribe sounds flat!

I don't gig but the tribe seems and feels very solid.

I never had to contact Korg.

Since the tribe isn't cheap in the Netherlands I definitely like what it offers. I would definitely buy it again if it were stolen or anything. I use both parts in everything I do. I like the character of the Tribe, it's sounds are very distinct.
I even traded my E-mu Xtreme lead for this EA-1 because I was so in love with it. I have owned an mc303, cs1x, rm1x, Xtreme Lead and a Boss 202. The tribe is by far the coolest sounding in my opinion!

Very simple to use, the interface is simple. The presets sound pretty good and show the wide variety of sounds the EA-1 can produce. The manual is clear.

Pretty limmited in polyphony only 2 voices at a time. Channel 1 is for part 1 and channel 2 for part 2. You can send more than than 2 at once with mixed results. The built in effects are pretty good. The midi implementation is great. It has a built in sequencer that works well and is simple to use. You can even record into the sequencer from a computer or other midi gear. Only one knob movement can be recorded into the sequencer per part, but if you are using an external sequencer you can control all the knobs.

Pretty basic analog sounding sounds. Anything from deep bass to ear piercing notes. I think it works the best for use in techno or experimental music. Lots of good features and filters. The portamento on the EA-1 sounds much better than an Access Virus.

I definitly would pick another one up. The price for performance can't be beat. I haven't seen something with this many features for less than $800 US.