3 of my favorite tones:
0:34 Brass
3:05 Soft Keys
6:06 Big String Pad
The Korg Poly 800 was one of Korg's responses to Roland's lauded Juno series. There's a similar architecture, with 8 DCOs and a single VCF. You can run the DCOs 2x per voice to get 4-voices, or 1x to get 8-voices. There's also a pleasant onboard chorus. The tones are pure 1980s - there's still lots of analog vibe to it. The 2-axis joystick is super fun too, you can control pitch bend on X-axis and DCO/VCF wobble on the Y-axis.
Where this synth really excels is in soft keyboard tones, brasses, analog strings and pads. There are some decent bass & lead sounds that you could definitely massage in a mix, but "huge" is not a descriptor I would apply to this.
Programming is pretty easy, there's no menu diving, just type the numbers and set the parameter! Not as easy as a one-knob-per-function synth, but nowhere near as bad as something like the alpha-juno nightmare. There's an unusual 2-stage ADSR so you can get some funny slap-back effects.
It sounds GREAT while being run through pedals. You can even run it on C batteries and it seems to last quite a while. Honestly there are a lot of features that make this a good live synth - including strap buttons!
I recorded through stereo DI boxes into my Sound Workshop 1280 mixing board, then into my UAD Apollo 16. In this video, there's just a touch of hall reverb (Valhalla Vintage Verb).
#synthesizer #notalking #sounddemo #korg #poly800