Most synths pretend to be acoustic instruments. Korg's phase8 skips the pretending. The sound comes from real steel being set in motion, with a synth's control layer on top: eight independent electromechanical voices, each with its own steel resonator 12.

Retunable resonators you can touch

The resonators aren't fixed. Korg ships 13 chromatically tuned resonators, and you can install any eight of them at once 2. Sound On Sound notes they can be swapped or retuned to change the instrument's tuning, scale and tone 1.

The instrument is also played by hand. Per Sound On Sound, you can touch, pluck or strike the resonators by hand and add external objects for texture 1. Korg's page lists touch, pluck, strum and tap interaction, with an AIR slider that sets how much of the acoustic response you hear 2.

The family tree: 1886 to 2026

The idea has a long lineage. The celesta, patented by Auguste Mustel of Paris in 1886, works by hammers striking steel bars mounted over wooden resonators 4. Tchaikovsky heard it in Paris in 1891 and told Jurgenson to keep his purchase secret, so that Russian rivals such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov wouldn't take the idea; the following year it got its most famous lines in The Nutcracker 5.

The phase8 keeps the core idea, struck steel set vibrating, and swaps the keyboard's mechanical hammers for electronic control and a sequencer 12.

The electronic half

Under the steel there's a full sequencer and modulation section. Korg's spec covers an envelope that ranges from short percussive hits to long sustains, a polymetric sequencer with step programming, unquantized live recording and per-voice step skip, eight sequence memory slots and parameter automation 2. For modulation there's tremolo plus two pitch-dependent audio-rate modes, one of which can be harmonically quantized, and a tempo-synced trigger delay 2.

Korg phase8, per Korg and Sound On Sound

Voices
8 independent electromechanical voices with steel resonators 2
Resonators
13 supplied, chromatically tuned; any 8 installed at once 2
Sequencer
step + unquantized live recording, per-voice step skip, 8 memories 12
I/O
MIDI TRS-A in/out, USB-C (USB-MIDI), sync in/out, CV in (±5V), 1/4" line out, 3.5mm headphones 1
Size and weight
231 × 236.5 × 46 mm, 1.71 kg, 12V adaptor 1
Price
$1,149.99 at US retail as of Nov 14, 2026 (same as the launch street price) 16

For a scoring rig, the I/O matters as much as the steel. MIDI over TRS and USB, sync in and out and a CV input mean it can sit on a click track alongside the DAW rather than being a standalone toy 1.

The software is catching up

Ahead of ADE in Amsterdam in October, Korg said it would preview a browser-based companion app, which MusicTech described as adding a visual interface for global parameter control, step sequencing, modulation and random sequence generation 3. The first public preview was scheduled for an ADE session on October 23 3. We haven't found a report from the session itself, and no release date or price had been announced in that coverage 3.

For the other big synth launch we are tracking, see our Leviasynth explainer.