However, negatives are that the original hardware really did invite lots of hands-on modulation action – tweaking, sliding and bending that modulation strip – and unless you have a decent hardware controller, you won’t easily recreate much of the fun of the original. Other sounds bring a tear to our eye, wondering where that quarter of a century has gone… This opens up its sound design possibilities and if you didn’t know this from using the original hardware, you’ll soon realise what a flexible beast it was. M1 Le is a limited edition of the M1 software synthesizer (included in the KORG Collection) that conveniently brings the sounds of the ground-breaking M1. The pros are that you get polyphony and to see much of the guts of Prophecy on screen, only achieved with the original if you surfed down through layers of menus.

You get to see right inside its MOSS (Multi-Oscillator Synthesis System) architecture and reminisce in those preset sounds. Here it is recreated in all of its glory, guts and all.

It was a mono synth and quite weird in that it straddled so many sounds and styles, but we loved it. This arrived as dance music was at something of a peak, and offered not only hands-on, real-time 303 bassy sounds but a whole lot of real instruments, all given life and lustre thanks to a unique (for then) touch strip modulation bar that allowed you to add a dose of any controller to any sound. Next up we have one of our favourite 90s synths, the Korg Prophecy.

Korg collection software