Bad Gear - Korg Poly-800 - 80s Throwback Synth

Holy crap “$19.95 plus shipping” hit me so hard in the feels

What I need in my life is a playlist of all the Bad Gear songs by themselves. This series has produced some seriously good tunes!

I had one of these back in its glory days of the '80's and absolutely loved it. Armed with my Tascam Porta Studio, the Poly 800 provided the atmosphere and my beloved, MiniMoog did the leads and bass. I had a blast! I bet many '80's bedroom producers started with this synth.

History: Poly-800s have been used by Orbital, Depeche Mode, Sneaker Pimps, Vangelis, Geoff Downes, Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), Yesterdays and Jimi Tenor. The Poly-800 is an eight-voice instrument (two more than the Juno series) with 64 memory patches (half of what the Juno-106 offered) and up to 50 editable parameters! Like the Juno, the Poly-800 had one DCO per voice, although it did feature a Double mode in which the oscillators could be stacked up for a fuller sound and only four voices of polyphony. The analog filter is a 24dB/oct low-pass which is shared by all voices (the Juno has separate filter chips for each voice). There's also a stereo chorus effect.

3:18 "...of course needs to be loaded with a Maj7" Actually plays an Amin7 😁

Korg Poly 800, a Yamaha DX9 and later an Ensoniq Mirage. Those were my keys back in 1986. They complimented each other nicely. Memories...😎

Heh. I still remember a high school talent show from around 1987, when a student band pulled off Rush's Tom Sawyer with one of these. Surprisingly close sounding to the original filter sweep, given the conditions.

Without this piece of 'bad gear' we would not have the sound of Techno! Listen to Juan Atkins and the Belleville Three. Keep up the good work you are edutaining a whole generation who have only grown up 'in the box'.

I always liked the sound of those steppy sawtooths made from phase-aligned square harmonics. Gives a slight fuzzy quality to them!

My first synth 🥲 An uncle lent it to me for 2 months. 20 years ago exactly. Will never forget it 😍

That polyrhthmic sequence section was tight. You've just inspired me to get my soldering iron out again

When I started reading about people wanting the Poly-800's "warm, fat sound", that's when I realized the vintage synth craze had reached total insanity. This was my first synth and it was a huge disappointment. No top end, no bottom end, sluggish stepped envelopes, thin plasticy oscillators, and of course paraphonic. Just horrible. On the plus side, every synth I got after this seemed amazing in comparison.

I like that they leaned into the fact that they're using a 7 segment display, and made their legends in the same "font"

Another high quality Bad Gear. You made it sound good. Thanks for doing the work.

You have mastered your video format! It amazes me every time!

Your ending jam names just keep getting better!

I want one now! Loved that 80’s synthwave vibe! Brilliant review…. And the video editing is so good!

I bought my Poly 800 mk II a few months ago and can't get enough of that 80's cheese ❤

Your videos bring me great joy!

Been watching a bunch of your vids lately and I'm consistently impressed by the tracks you make to demo the synths. But, for whatever reason, the ones in this video really jammed hard for me. So good!