An awful lot of features are packed into the diminutive yet high performance, battery-powered 37-key microKORG synthesizer/vocoder. When you consider this $500 MSRP keyboard uses the same DSP synthesis engine as the MS-2000 and includes the 64 DWGS waveforms from the DW8000 synth to the standard 71 set of waves, you end up with a versatile keyboard that'll do most all sounds--even electric pianos, bells or guitars. The four resonant filter modes are low pass, bandpass, a high pass two-pole and an all-important 24dB/octave four-pole low pass. There are two envelope generators, two MIDI-locked LFOs and a Virtual Patch matrix for setting up advance modulations schemes.

The eight-band vocoder has a voice formant capture feature that can "freeze" and then play the current set of formants across the entire keyboard. This frees you from having to continually sing into the mic and the formant set can be saved as part of the vocoder program. Lastly, you can shift all the formants of your voice up or down to change the gender sound--if you dare! There are two onboard effect processors: a flanger/chorus/phaser modulation effect and a delay processor with three different delay effects. Delays can be synched to the built-in arpeggiator or to external MIDI clocks. Finally, there are a total of 128 sound presets including 16 vocoder presets with all locations available for user over-writing (yes!); five realtime controller knobs, pitch and mod wheels, complete MIDI controller abilities, and the specifically designed vocoder microphone is included.