The Korg Polysix came out in 1981, and along with Roland’s Juno-6 it represented a new era of flexible, analog poly synths that mere mortals could afford.

I used Korg’s VST version of the Polysix a lot back in the 2000s, and it’s always been on my list of dream synths. This year I finally took a gamble on a broken one–Polysixes are notorious for their “leaking battery” issue that can destroy circuit boards.

Mike Walters at Mystery Circuits got it up and running again, and a few Tubbutec mods have added a few tricks up its sleeve. Now that I’ve spent some serious time with it, I’m blown away with this thing. By modern standards it’s a very simple synth; each voice only has 1 oscillator, LFO, and envelope. But tiny changes to each setting can have an enormous impact on the sound. The sub oscillator, pulse width modulation and the onboard Chorus/Ensemble effect can take things to unexpected places quickly. And unison mode will give you huge basses and leads.

This pack focuses on bold, brash and weird sounds–maybe not what you’d expect from this thing.

These are 44.1kHz 16 bit mono WAV files, perfect for dropping into most samplers.