My goodness, am I having a lot of fun with my most recent acquisition, the Korg DW-8000. I recently picked up this up off Ebay from a local seller here in Japan. Although I get most of my gear from local used audio/music shops, I also like to snag old broken gear off Ebay from Japan. ( The shipping locally is much better than shipping overseas of course! ). The Korg DW-8000 had a couple of sticky keys on the very right which reduced the price some. Most notably though, I rarely see a Korg DW-8000 for sale in Japan. So, I decided to grab it and I’m so happy I did. It’s a wonderful synth that fits the retro 80’s sound very well.
Although the factory patches are not bad, I quickly collected a few sets around the Internet and found many to be quite good. The Korg DW-8000 patches from this site are very good: http://www.pallium.com/bryan/dwpatches.php.
I also just picked up the four banks of DW-8000 patches from KidNepro as well which are top notch.
http://www.kidnepro.com/KN/Korg/DW-EX8000.html
Furthermore, I recently have been knee deep in programming ipad controllers for some of my synths using the fabulous MIDIDESIGNER app. I previously create a Korg MS2000 layout and now just finished a Korg DW-8000 layout which controls all of the parameters quite easily. In fact, the Korg DW-8000 has really good midi implementation and you can really do a lot of programming with it via midi and sysex.
Overall, I’m really happy to finally have landed a Korg DW-8000. I see a lot of people acquiring them these days and it’s become quite popular with all sorts of styles of music. I can understand why because the sound pallet is not only easy to program and customize, but the sounds can also be quite diverse. Patch storage is decent and the on board ARP is superb! I also really like the joystick controllers on these older Korg synths.
Below is a great Korg DW-8000 demo from AnalogAudio1 from whom I recently purchased Korg Poly-61 and Roland Juno-60 patches from.
Jim Atwood in Japan 