I've been a long time Roland user before switching to Korg, after reading so many laudatory reviews of the first Triton (1999, if I recall well).
Yes, I was stupid because I bought it without even trying it, convinced that it was a god's gift after those deceptive reviews... and that I could keep it fo ever.
First of all, I was struck by the interface and menus: it looked like old MS-DOS ghost coming back!!!
Seemed that Korg engineers had no idea of what was a nice computer with user friendly menus (did I say Mac?
) , they did everything on the contrary of what was coherent.
By that time USB was starting and those morons implemented ADB instead and an old Floppy drive!!! (yes you could buy a priceless SCSI expansion, great...
I was petrified when I heard the piano sounds and the violins! even my old low price Roland SC55 was better!!! Well maybe for techno things it was ok, but I don't play techno...
I'm mainly a guitarist so I haven't used it very much and my father died also that year so I started heavy testing more than one year later and was more and more amazed of the nonsenses I discovered.
They're so numerous that it would just be boring to state them here, but mainly every wise thing I wanted to do was impossible (and I'm a computer and sound ingeneer, so it's not that I wasn't able).
I wrote some of them in a text file for anyone interrested...
Just some examples:
- if you want to use SongPlay mode to chain songs in a gig, you can't start them with a footswitch!!!
- This mode uses the same set of sounds for all the songs, forget using different sounds on each song during a gig!!!
- And worse of all, it doesn't even start immediately when you press START!!!
Was I asking too much???
Ok, let's use Sequencer mode instead?
Well, it's quite ok (so what's the use of SongPlay mode?
) but if you want to stop a song in the middle and restart (I've got a few songs with that kind of breaks and I have to start again for the end of the song to occur), no way! It stops exactly when you press STOP (or the pedal) which makes sense in a way, but there's no option on how you start back, meaning that you start where you stopped: useless! It would have been nice to have an option to start to the next measure or position at next song's start point...
Then, after less than two years of scarce use, all the panel switches started to rust (I had to strike them harder and harder...), I thought it was because I wasn't using it enough and as the guarantee was over, i hoped that using it more would change something, but of course not...
(note that i said "rust", but it's just a metaphor, my Triton has always been in a dry room)
I haven't mentionned the noise of those switches! If you have to set something in a silent moment, all the audience hear "cloc", "cloc"... (same thing about the dazzling Touch Panel: I had to put coloured gelatine to protect my eyes and not look like a vampire in dark gigs
)
Well, I finally used it as a rhythm box even if the drum sounds are not amazing, but what saves the Triton is its effects, amp simulators and so on.
For a 2000€, it's quite an expensive rhythm box!!!
Oh nice organ sounds also, whith excellent rotary simulation!!!
So, I can't use it for what I need on stage, in the end I swear I'll never buy Korg again (even if Roland hasn't made any synth worth in the past decade — as it has been before with D10, D50, W30, SC series), and most of all, I swear I'll try thoroughly anything before buying!
