Korg MS-10
Korg MS-10 is the junior of the MS-family (which also can be said to include the SQ-10 sequencer and the VC-10 vocoder). Its basic building blocks are not too exciting: 1 oscillator, 1 two pole lowpass filter, 1 envelope (HADSR, where H means Hold) and an LFO. However, like its big brothers, the MS-10 is "semi-modular"; you can re-patch some of the connections using a number of jackks to the right on the panel. If no cables are connected, an internal, normal signal flow is used - this can be broken by patching (e.g. replacing the envelope control of the filter with an external modulation source).
This is a good system, the only problem being that there's far too few of everything! Once you've started patching, you always end up being frustrated, since the input or output you need simply isn't available. Still, you can do some things that wouldn't be possible on a conventional synthesizer.
The actual sound of the synth is dominated by the very "screamy" filter - it's really something else. If you push the resonance to the max, the filter starts self-oscillating, and you can easily get a kind of distortion between oscillator and the "filter tone", resembling the effects of oscillator sync. Unique and useful! Other niceties include the LFO waveforms; you can sweep it continuously from sawtooth through triangle to inverted sawtooth, or from pulse through square to inverted pulse.
The MS-10 is not our own synth, but we have been allowed to borrow it several times from our good friend Marcus Z. It's been used on Tiger Rag, Night Train, Perdido (where it plays latin percussion, among other things!) and not least on our live gig for dr Moog! Despite its frustrating deficiencies we would gladly have one of our own (or even better an MS-20 or MS-50... any sellers out there?).