Quote Originally Posted by Decimal
the korg ES1 is my life. i love that thing, my only complaint is there is only a low pass filter and no hp or bp. :(

the ESX, however, has about twice the functionality (including hp/bp filters!), so for $200 or so more, you get a big upgrade.


they are great machines. well worth the money.
I concur. Altho it really depends what you want to use them for...?

In my oppinion they (the ES-1 and ESX versions) make shit hot drum machines for live jamming. The rest I don't really like because they are more grooveboxy. With the sampling (ES) versions you at least get the option to dump in some killer sounds and **** them up on the fly or just emulate the classic drum boxes. Its quite flexible.

They are dirt cheap right now, take a beating (dropped it on concrete) and small/light enough to throw in a backpack.

One major drawback is no decay knob which really sucks when you wanna gate some hi-hats from long to short etc...

Another thing to look out for is no velocity. They have a "motion sequencer" which you can use to get different volumed hits. You get a pettern running select the drum part, hit record and tweak away on the volume knob, it then stores this and loops it. Same result as velocity and you can sequence all the knobs on the panel this way or using the step mode.

The ES-1 also has 32khz sampling rate so u get slightly crunchier drums (I like). The ESX has 44khz so its cleaner if thats important...


Thats all probably a bunch of info that you didn't need to know so I'll leave it at that. PM me if you need to know anything specific...