This image was taken from a Korg trade publication from the early eighties. This is how they envisioned a sophisticated gentleman's living room should look like, your Korg synths up on breeze blocks, your Korg brand reel to reel machine, a shelf of quarter inch tapes for your listening pleasure, and a couple of bottles of fine cognac. Its odd how spot on they got it, how forward thinking Korg's marketing team were to have predicted successfully that one day every bachelor's living area would look exactly like this. I know mine does more or less, except I have hardwoods, a signed Nagel print up on the wall and beanbags stuffed with coke ridden hundred dollar bills for my guests to sit on.
I was in my Korg inspired living room listening to some modern track with a vocoder on the vocal line. I'm not saying anything against vocoder vocals, saying they are played out is like claiming a guitar or piano is played out, they have been on lots of records since the dawn of time too, I don't think using a vocoder is necessarily gimmicky, just should be used a little more sparingly perhaps. What do I know anyway, like I said before I'm not Beethoven, but it did inspire me to try and record a few under appreciated and under the radar vocoder jams from the device's (first) heyday, when a vocoder wasn't a default plugin in your download from a Russian torrent site, but instead was a about half the size and weight of a small car engine and likely to cost you twice as much.. I didn't do very well though, I only managed two before the dust from my epic crates started to make me sneeze and I gave up..
