Korg Phase8 Limited Edition

As both a drone synthesist and kalimba player I've been really excited about this one when I heard about it. Resonating metal tongues you can connect to a sequencer? Check. No need to pre-record/loop sequences before feeding it into effects? Check. Live manipulation to get some more weirdities and variation ouf it? Check!

All really cool points in my book. But what's in front of me feels... well, bland. And questionably limited. None of the per-note envelope and modulation settings feel particularly impactful, envelope lengths are a bit of a joke and whatever modulation you can fool around with just adds drive, muffle or minor waveform changes. Yes, you can play with the tongues directly but there's so little room you'd be better off fingerdrumming on a contact mic and it'd sounds just the same. You can do a bunch of things with the sequencer but given how almost nothing on this really feels worth tweaking and you only get 8 steps for any voice anyway... nope, sorry.

At the end of the day it's a toy - a sort of "Volcalimba" to add some plinky-plonky to your oompa-doompa. Don't get me wrong, it's a quite unique at what does and I might've been a bit too invested in what it could do. But given a price point of 969€ it feels woefully ill-equipped on its own. Interesting, yes, but ultimately disappointing. I do love the buttons, though!