In the world of digital music, there's been a longstanding divide between the hardware synthesizer and the computer. You can hook a keyboard controller to a computer, or even build a custom Windows PC into a keyboard frame, like the OpenLabs NeKo. Fundamentally, though, the two categories have remained distinct—until this year's launch of the Korg OASYS, that is.

The designers at Korg have built a super-keyboard that fuses the open platform of a PC with the dedicated, proprietary sound engines of a traditional hardware synth. With its uniquely deep sound-production capabilities, the OASYS, whose name stands for Open Architecture Synthesis Studio, is more than a traditional electronic keyboard. And it's also more than a computer, with lavish audio quality that high-end audio workstations struggle to match.

Even if you can't afford an OASYS—Korg acknowledges that the $8,000 sticker price will limit its audience—a look inside this mammoth keyboard reveals a lot about how a high-end digital musical instrument can be created. It's certainly a glimpse into the future of Korg, but it offers insight into the future of the musical instrument industry, too. And, perhaps for the first time, the words digital and luxury come together in a profoundly musical instrument that's a dream to play.

I got a chance to spend some time with Korg research & development product manager Dan Phillips and Korg USA keyboard and recording products manager Jerry Kovarsky to get hands-on with the OASYS and find out what makes it tick. I wanted to know, as many digital musicians do, what kinds of decisions go into creating an instrument using today's technologies? Do the craftspeople behind modern digital instruments have the same kinds of interests as traditional instrument builders? How do you turn a sophisticated, Linux-based hardware monster into something that works onstage? The answers often come down to subtle technical details that many casual onlookers would easily miss. (And, yes, I found out why an OASYS is so expensive, too.)

The Korg OASYS workstation combines high-definition synthesis, hard disk audio recording, multitrack MIDI sequencing, KARMA algorithmic music generation, a control surface, a touch-sensitive color display, and a CD burner for rendering your compositions. Inside, a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor runs Linux, permitting feature updates. A new one was just announced this week.

What Makes OASYS . . . OASYS

The OASYS has high-end specs galore. Inside its road-ready frame a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 runs an integrated Linux-based operating system and a proprietary sound engine that represents decades of Korg's sound design experience. On the outside, it's all keyboard, sporting 76 or 88 keys (synth or hammer action), a 10.4-inch color LCD screen, and a control surface with drum pads, chord triggers, joysticks, a ribbon controller, and assignable switches, knobs, and faders. Its three sound engines, offering analog modeling, tonewheel organ, digital sampling/synthesis, and combinations of the three, can play as many as 172 voices at once.

But when Jerry Kovarsky wants to show off the OASYS, he doesn't mention specs. He lets that 172-voice polyphony rip. Running his arm across the keyboard's eight octaves, Jerry sends the OASYS into a roaring Hammond organ glissando. The heavily layered patch doesn't blink. "Try that with a soft synth," he says, flashing a kid-with-a-Christmas-toy smile. When the OASYS was unveiled at the NAMM show in January after years of rumors and anticipation, people didn't talk about specs. The buzz, aside from the price, was all about how the OASYS sounds.

Despite its forward-looking features, the OASYS design has a long, interesting history. It's the culmination of work stretching back to the early '90s. The current product resulted from a collaboration between Korg R&D in California and Korg, Inc., in Japan. The U.S. team, including Phillips and many others, focused on sound generation and processing aspects while the Japanese team worked primarily on the hardware, user interface, sequencing, recording, and KARMA (Stephen Kay's algorithmic music engine).

The prototype OASYS (bottom, in a museum display commemorating Korg's 40th anniversary) was so far ahead of its time that it never shipped. However, Korg spun off parts of the OASYS physical modeling technology into more affordable instruments like the monophonic Prophecy (top).

Although this is the first shipping keyboard to bear the name OASYS, Korg has shipped products based on the same technology; the same R&D team developed the original OASYS keyboard prototype and the later OASYS PCI, a PCI card and software platform for PC and Mac. "Many of the underlying algorithms are carried through from those earlier projects," says Phillips, though he and Kovarsky emphasize that Korg has optimized and expanded nearly everything. If the OASYS PCI sounds were the originals, then each OASYS keyboard sound is a "special edition" extended version.

How did Korg go from keyboard to PCI card to keyboard again? "The whole idea was that you'd have a system that was upgradeable, that wasn't based on dedicated hardware to make the sound," says Phillips. Most digital audio gear relies on specialized chips called ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, pronounced "AY-sik"), as opposed to the standard, generic integrated circuitry of a computer. In other words, each time you want to build a new musical instrument, you create new, specialized chips for the job. That keeps production costs down on high-volume products like the Korg Triton, but freezes the design, so the basic synthesis method of the instrument is not upgradeable, except via additional hardware.

Computer circuitry provides much more power and flexibility, but it's labor-intensive and expensive to create, produce, and program for use in musical instruments. The idea of OASYS was to meet the challenges of the open-platform design while choosing specifications that turned the keyboard into a luxury item, rather than a low-cost commodity instrument.