It used to be that putting synth into heavy music was original, but now there are a million bands doing it and they all sound the same.

I believe this has a lot to do with the overwhelming dominance of the ‘MicroKorg’ in the genre.

Sure, it’s priced fairly reasonably, user friendly, portable, has some fat sounds, a simple arpeggiator and even a built in vocoder – but all this comes at the cost of making your band a carbon copy of everyone else.

It’s so prominent that people tend to assume that I must be using it; after all, everyone else does.

If you’re going to follow the crowd and put some synth in your already generic hardcore band at least buy something different – please!

Learn to program your own rythms, make your own sounds and maybe even learn to play the piano first?!

Join a band to actually play keyboard, instead of pressing ‘enter’ to launch into a pre-prgrammed synth pattern that your bandmates chug along to. A guy at Korg in Milton Keynes did that – not you.

Trust me, you’ll sound a hundred times more original.

I suspect that most people using these don’t really have a clue what they’re doing and just picked it up because a) everyone else has got one, and b) it’s the only synth they could figure out how to make listenable noises from.

If that’s you; either put in the effort, or do something else.

Most of the bands I hear doing this don’t actually suck, but they do sound very, very similar, and I’m sure there are many more bands out there that doing this that do suck. Big time.

Anyway, here’s a selection of lazy abusers of the MicroKorg;

I could go on…