Music workstation

A music workstation is an electronic musical instrument providing the facilities of:

It enables a musician to compose electronic music using just one piece of equipment.

The concept of a music sequencer combined with a synthesizer originated in the late 1970s with the combination of microprocessors, mini-computers, digital synthesis, disk-based storage, and control devices such as musical keyboards becoming feasible to combine into a single piece of equipment that was affordable to high-end studios and producers, as well as being portable for performers. Prior to this, the integration between sequencing and synthesis was generally a manual function based on wiring of components in large modular synthesizers, and the storage of notes was simply based on potentiometer settings in an analog sequencer.

Polyphonic synthesizers such as Sequential Circuit Prophet-5 and Yamaha DX7 were capable of playing only one patch at a time (the DX7II could play 2 patches on 2 separate MIDI channels) There was some sequencing ability in some keyboards, but it was not MIDI sequencing.

In the mid to late 80s, workstation synths were manufactured more than single-patch keyboards. A workstation such as the Korg M1 was able to play out 8 different patches on 8 different MIDI channels, as well as playing a drum track, and had an onboard MIDI sequencer. The patches were often samples, but you could not record your own samples, as you could on a Fairlight. Having samples as the sound source is what made it possible to have various drum sounds in one patch. In contrast, a DX7 or a JX3P did not have the synthesis features to create all the sounds in a drum kit.

Examples of early music workstations included the New England Digital Synclavier and the Fairlight CMI.

The result was that music workstations evolved rapidly during this period, as new software releases could add more functionality, new voice cards developed, and new input technologies added.

By 1982, the Fairlight CMI Series II represented another advance as it now offered more RAM-based sample memory than any other system with an improved sample rate, and in the Series III (1985) changed from 8-bit to 16-bit samples. The Synclavier introduced hard-disk based sampling in 1982, storing megabytes of samples for the first time.

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