Tatsuya ‘Tats’ Takahashi – who made a name for himself working on some of Korg‘s most interesting recent products – is now working to launch a new subsidiary, Korg Germany.
In an earlier role as Chief Engineer of Analog Synthesizers at Korg, Takahashi helped create a wide range of popular synths and electronic music gear, including the Monotrons, Volcas, Korg’s ARP and MS-20 reissues, the Minilogue and more. In the last few years, he’s worked on a variety of projects, including installations and an effects unit for the Red Bull Music Academy.
Takahashi is the CEO of the new Berlin-based branch of Korg, and is building a team to create new products.
Korg Germany has also announced its COO, Maximilian Rest. Rest is the founder of Berlin-based E-RM, maker of the Multiclock sync device. Rest and Takahashi will be running what’s described as an ‘engineering playground for musical instruments and accessories’.
Korg Germany is now hiring, looking for electrical, mechanical and software engineers.
Damn, this is excellent news! Good to see Tats back with Korg. Congratulations T!
You must live in the US…
You must live in, err… Europe? And if not, what does it matter anyway? I have every right to my excitement that my favorite Korg engineer has returned to design for them. #GOTATS
Wow this is crazy. He resigned from Korg to pursue his own projects, and now this.
Pro-tip, Taks: those Germans are fantastic at mechanical engineering, best in the world. But software and electrical’s going to be a challenge. Hope you can whip them into shape. User experience is not their strong point, needs work.
Also Germany needs to work on the reliability of their devices.
Lol yeah right that’s why German software from Siemens, Bosch and SAP runs the world and their cars UX is generally considered the best in the world. Where did the get these ridiculous ideas?
I’m more worried about the lack of good Japanese food in Berlin, it’s all in Dusseldorf. Sessions at the izakaya are essential for Japanese engineering. Sessions at Berghain, not sure….
See – that’s why Native Instruments, Bitwig and Ableton are such bad companies and their products are full of crap… noone uses their software, because it’s badly designed from every angle and the germans really showed off their bad software writing skills…
😀
pathetic 😀
Be humble to other people, no matter what country you’re in.
The brexit could crash the British musicindustry for example. Nobody is waiting for that.
UK music ..been naff for sometime
Most music tech programmers in Berlin are international.
Rabid Bat seems to have lost it. Ableton, Native Instruments and Steinberg are based in Germany. They have somewhat okay software teams. The wonder of the EU is that you don’t have to be German to live and work there. Unlike Rabid Batland.
As far as UX and industrial design goes, Axel Hartman’s work with Moog, Waldorf, Arturia and others is kinda okay.
Admin: Troll comment deleted.
Thurston Tyson – trolling and personal attacks will get deleted, and wasting the admin’s time will get you banned.
Keep comments on topic and constructive.
If you’re the real deal – that’s the sound of thousands of Volca lovers making cool spluttery beats and skronky basslines. Not everything has to be political – love getting away from snap judgements in synth land.
My only request if it ever gets out there is to maybe see what support can be given to ES2 and I suppose E2 users – not your area and I know some people are down on them, but they are fantastic for building tracks and sound great – they could possibly just use a little ‘rounding out.’ I know voice allocation and glitching/gainstaging/input noise are issues for some. Otherwise I felt it was a very featured instrument and way deeper than it looks.
I know lots of people are clamouring for a new Mono/Poly but I’d like to see something in the area of a ‘Volca XL,’ slightly bigger monotribe style case and maybe 2 functions like a bass line and percussion generator and clock divider, a duophonic wavetable synth with joystick and looping delay, for example, make it all semi-modular with a ribbon controller. Like the bridge between Volcas, desktop semi modules and Electribe…
Orrr…an Electribe 3s or Volca sample Deux with Nutube and SD card storage and bigger ribbon chromatic ‘pads,’ solid midi out, reverb/delay and filter.
I hope I haven’t wasted a coffee/smoke break! Thanks for beautiful synths
If you are real, I think the idea of a wavetable based Volca would be cool. Also have the ability for users to create there own tables, if it isn’t too much trouble. No pressure, not trying to rush you…it was just an idea I had.
Ableton, Bitwig, Cubase… all in Germany, as well as StudioOne Development was founded and is based in Germany, Logic is still developed in Germany, not to speak about U-He, Native and many others not mentioned here. Nations don’t matter so much, so please don’t spread cliches. We are one world speaking same language of music.
Where’s the Arp 2600?
I don’t care how! I want it now!
-Veruca Salt
My guess: With 2/3 of Native Instruments’ former employees on the job market, Korg went hunting for talent. Good move and exciting news to have Tatsuya in town.
> Korg Germany is now hiring
prediction: hartmann will join them. rolf wöhrmann won´t be happy about the news, because waldorf depends on him to keep his word. they hired him relatively recently.
suggestion: make an electribe pro w/ 8-bar-patterns, and REAL song mode! no “pattern chain” crutch, please.
I agree.
Unfortunately, Tats doesn’t appear to be an engineer for the Electribe lineup.
E2 and ES2 get a bad wrap – you can get a lot of juice back by allocating polyphony and fx in the settings but I feel you.
What I’d love is a further update to the OS of the existing lineup to squeeze out further Gremlins. Such as noise floor on external input… I’m more or less happy with the pattern chaining.
The existing lineup could just use a little more software tweaking to remove glitches and maybe make the voice allocation better, outputs sound beautiful but the mixing in it is a little low-to-whoa very quickly.
In the future I think one that borrows from all eras would be great. Would love to just see an ES3 with predictable voice count and nu-tubes on the output, drag and drop samples as well as a high quality input and a scribble strip of shift functions!
Korg 2600 is probably one of the first onthe list
Folks we are gonna see a lot of great stuff from this guy again
I can just feel it
Wonderful news !
So, maybe we will see him at Sooperbooth 2020.
Nice to hear there will propably be new interesting products available soon.
Tats brought me with his volcas into this nice Hobby of Synthesizer and all Kind
Of machines around me now.
Thanks for that i have enjoyed the last years with my boxes 🙂
Nés substitute for Kronos coming soin?
Tats, maybe create an analog workstation to compete with the one launched by Roland. But perhaps it would be able to accept / read code from their software synthesizers, making it the ultimate analog combo between Roland and KORG.
I would like a fully analog workstation.
To compete with which one created by Roland?
Really excited to see Mr Takahashi heading an operation like this. Can’t wait to see what they come up with. The Volcas prompted me making the switch from software to hardware.
Tats seems to be a hero of the analogue renaissance, not just influencing Korg but the whole synth industry. Saving up money now. 😉
Great information, but I had a misunderstanding. Where is the confidence that this will actually be a working scheme?