Korg Forums

[mikeondrums]

Hi, all. New to the forum, so hello to everyone.

I picked up a used (obviously) Wavestation EX a couple of weeks ago and am having a blast with it. Of course, like everyone who buys one of these, I got it home and discovered the battery was dead and the RAM banks were gone. No problem -- it just forced me to learn how to load new sounds from the computer sooner than I would have otherwise.

My question is about managing the performance banks. With one ROM bank and two RAM banks, the synth will hold 150 performances at any one time (I understand the EX originally came with the WPC-00PIII card, but mine didn't, so I'm limited to the on-board banks for now).

From what I can tell, performances are loaded by bank, not individually. In other words, if I want to load a new performance from my computer, I have to load the entire bank.

So, now, finally, to the question: What's the typical way of adding just one performance, or maybe one performance plus the other performances that it depends on? Sysexing the sounds over from my computer automatically loads into RAM1, so it overwrites whatever else is there. So it seems like I would need to kind of use RAM2 as my "favorites" bank, and use RAM1 as a "staging" bank where I first load the entire sysex that contains the performance I want, and then move the specific performance(s) over to RAM2 somewhere, and then reload RAM1 with whatever it had before.

Does this make sense? I know that modern synths come with software for managing this kind of thing, but I couldn't find anything cheap (meaning, free) that would do it for the WS.

TIA!
_________________
Mike

[mikeondrums]

Not a real active forum, it appears!

For the benefit of other newbies that run across this thread, I'll respond to my own question with what I've learned so far. First off, sounds aren't loaded "automatically" into RAM1 like I said earlier. The destination is contained in the sysex file, so it's just as likely to load into RAM2. If I had thought about it, I would have realized that since at one point I loaded RAM1 and RAM2 from two separate files, and another time I loaded them from a single file.

Also, there a librarian application called Wavestation Sound Editor from a company called SoundTower that you can download from their website. It looks like it was written in the early days of Windows and is painfully amateurish by today's standards, but it seems to be held in fairly high regard. It's hard to say, though, because just about everything you read on the Internet regarding the Wavestation is as old as the Internet itself.

I've installed the WS Sound Editor and have played around with it, but I'm taking it slow, because the app doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. It's not the sort of application that you can figure out by just clicking around, because you never know when you're about to do something that should include a confirmation dialog, but there's no confirmation dialog because they hadn't been invented when this app was built.

In the meantime, I picked up a WPC-00PIII card on eBay, so I'll be able to keep 200 performances on the synth. I'll probably end up buying the Legacy softsynth app from Korg and bringing a laptop with me to band practice.

All this expense, and I'm not even a real keyboard player. I'm a drummer/percussionist, and I thought it would be cool to have a small synth as part of my percussion rig to add strings/pads on songs that don't need any drums or percussion. All indications are that the Wavestation is the perfect machine for this.

Anyway, thought I'd add this info in case another new Wavestation owner stumbles upon it.
_________________
Mike