At first glance, PS-3300 appears to possess a heart-stopping quantity of controls. Fortunately, it's much simpler than it appears:
PS-3300 consists of three identical polyphonic synth Voice Panels (left side of cab), and a single master panel at the right. Though modular synth-style jacks are included, PS-3300 is a "semi-normalled" instrument; that is, all signals are internally connected and no patching is required to create sounds. Internal connections are only overridden when cables are plugged in (sometimes they don't disconnect anything and just act additively). The three Voice Panel outputs are internally routed to the Master Panel's upper-left hand Signal Mixer section. You'll hear sound from the three voices as long as the orange slide switches are in the down position and the Volume knobs are up. Clicking any of the Signal Mixer orange slide switches up disables the Voice Panel (handy for isolation when creating sounds). We've also added LED signal indicators to each of the three channels to make it easier to tell what's making noise.
Voice Panel
Each of the three Voice Panels can be thought of as a totally independent single-oscillator polyphonic synth. Each one consists of a signal generator (Korg's silly name for an oscillator), a lowpass filter, an ADSR envelope generator, two Mod Generators (Korg's also-silly name for an LFO), and a "Resonators" section. We'll discuss it more later on, but the PS-3300's Resonators section is really unique, and amongst other things, it makes super fabulous phaser-type sounds.
Because the divide-down synthesis scheme entails twelve individual oscillators (one for each chromatic note of the highest-octave), this allows the inclusion of individual tuning controls for each note of the octave, allowing some interesting alternate tuning abilities, which we'll fully explain later.
Master Panel
The Master Panel includes a mixer, additional "mono" processing modules (sample & hold, an additional utility envelope generator, CV processors, and effects). We've also relocated controls and jacks originally in the left-hand section of the Korg PS-3010 keyboard controller to the master section, as they would've been at an awkward angle in our 3D keyboard art.
Keyboard and "Honda" Connector Cable
The keyboard has been accurately rendered because it looks super cool (that's how we roll). The keys can be played with a mouse and will animate when PS-3300 is controlled via MIDI notes. That massive Honda connector cable doesn't really do anything but it also looks really cool, and presents a swell opportunity for Mal to show off his formidable 3D modeling chops. We're pretty sure it's the same Honda responsible for the Elsinore 175 enduro bike I got pulled over on in Simi Valley in 1986 (and nailed for riding underage without a license...)
For the "that keyboard is taking up space on my display!" crowd, our apologies, but without the keyboard, this super awesome synth looks kinda blah, and we gotta sell tacos, okay?
