Korg Dw 8000 Manual

[Sofía Goldthwait]

DL8000This piece is quite a serious little delay line marred by a non-standard, and not-different-for-any-good reason interface (unless you need to see delay times from across the room), and a minimal manual.

As a hands-free looper, it needs some add-on pedals, but once fitted out with a stereo volume pedal to control audio input to the delay and an expression pedal to control feedback, it'll quite elegantly do up to 4 seconds of true stereo looping or 10 sec of mono (I patched it to the main outs of my primary mixer, so I can send it whatever's happening on any channel with a few button presses).

Additional foot pedals (or front-panel buttons) can add bypass, hold, and tap tempo (which will allow you to define loop length, at least in mono). Virtually any parameter can be adjusted with the expression pedal, but you can only tweek a few delay parameters a very small amount without introducing soon-quite-boring squeals and shreiks.

It does a bunch of other stuff like flanging and chorus, and has some neat preset rhythmic delay taps, EQs and audio-triggering modes, but I haven't explored these much, since looping is what I wanted it for. Programming it is not a picnic, as the interface is hard to get the hang of (or enjoy once you do), and the manual doesn't help with any application hints, but for $440 (pedals extra!), it was worth it for stereo, IMHO.

One of the nice things about working with old kit, is that the manuals actually give you tons of technical information. In this case, the Service Manual has a detailed schematic. The relevant bit is on page 18:

Since we don't want to affect MIDI THRU, but we do want to affect the MIDI stream before it reaches the CPU, then be need to do our hack somewhere between pin 12 of the CPU, and the first solder connection.

If a jumper is placed across the yellow and pink pins, then the synth should work as before. This is a good thing to test. Of course, DO NOT bridge the power pins by mistake, or you might not have a synth any more.

At this point I decided it was a good time to replace the battery, before it leaked or died. This wipes the patches from memory, so if you want them then make sure you have saved them and know how to restore them using SYSEX or tape.

You then need to install a CR2032 coin cell holder. I'm not aware of any that fit the footprint, so I ended up having to drill a new hole in the PCB. Luckily, there is plenty of board area free of tracks in this area, so it wasn't hard to find a suitable place.

After several unsuccessful tries I finally got the project working on my DW-8000! It seems that at least with the current MIDI arduino library there is a discrepancy between the MIDI channel numbering as received from the MIDI lib which runs from 1 to 16 and the MIDI channel numbering inside the SysEx Messages which run from 0 to 15. I removed the code parts where there was a check if the declared dwChannel was identical to the incoming message channel, and hardcoded it to only work on channel 1.

I just bought an EX-8000. Purchased an Arduino Nano today to try this mod. I'll post results. I have my Korg NanoKontrol2 connected to my PC running Cakewalk. The EX-800 is connected via midi to PC and works with Cakewalk. So shouldn't this combination work with this mod?

A little planning can go a long way with the AM8000R, and this is just one example of the surprising flexibility offered by what is essentially a simple processor. Negative points are few; while there is a tempo delay available, it can't be clocked to MIDI. You choose the tempo (in bpm), which will allow you to sync delays to a song's tempo, but if it varies by any great amount, the sync will come unstuck. The manual also has a lot in common with that provided with the DL8000R: it's not the clearest I've come across, and lacks basic material such as an overview of the unit and concise descriptions of what every parameter does, and how they interact.

The list of effects available to the FX1 and FX2 blocks, though relatively short, is comprehensive and includes a variety of stereo/dual options, where a dual effect offers independent parameters for left and right signal paths. The difference between stereo and dual effects is indicated by their names, but in the following list I've indicated the mono in/mono out effects with an (M), and mono in/stereo out effects with an (M/S).

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The Independent VCA Has is own input/output and 2 CV inputs.

First is linear CV.

The other is labelled Log in some version and seems to be a bias on another and is finally not usable, i think.

Here the function diagram and pinout.

One for the VCA

We can observe in DW-8000 and DSS-1 Service manual that the VCA output has already an Inverter OpAmp Stage.

I did the same, I suppose original circuity respects the internal output Impedance.

Obviously you're not obliged to use this switching circuit. All I/O are individually accessible on pin header.

You can use it to access I/O or to set it in the static configuration of your choice.

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