Hi there all, and Happy New Year!!!

I have a friend that has inherited a Korg M1 from his dad. He does not play it, just uses it to add one or two notes or sound effects to his videos...

Anyway, some time ago, he found out it displayed a message like "Internal battery low" or something (bear with me, he told me about this but I didn't experienced it myself)... he opened it up, replaced the battery and later found out that the internal presets that the instrument had were gone....

We fumbled a bit with it, and discovered that all the basic sounds are there (piano, elec.piano and so on), but its the "programs" (the list that you can scroll up or down and play) that are missing.

Trying to edit some of them we discovered that they are devoid of any effect or other sound shaping parameter (all parameters set to 0), sound bland as a result and sadly he hasn't got a manual as well, only a bunch of business card sized things tied with a ring, something like a programmer's reference cards.

Is there any way to reset the thing back in the original programs??

Any manual links that you know of?

I'm not an expert, but I would think that a Google for 'Korg M1 factory dump' would get you to the right places (results looked good when I typed it in...)

Thanks Diki.

I searhed the Web and found out that the internal data gets lost in the event of a battery fail, so you have to reload it via SysEx. I downloaded the appopriate SysEx and one or two sysex editors and I am going to try to load it up again.
If anyone has any hint you are welcome

Hey this is Synth Zone most classic synth support files are archived here. You can get the manual, factory presets plus much more at http://synthzone.com/midi/korg/m1/ To download the manual in pdf fornat right click and save as. The factory presets in sysex format are also here. If you need a program to send the sysex to the M1 get Midi-Ox from http://www.midiox.com/ There are many other patches as well for him to try.

Most of the best M1 sites I have listed at http://www.synthzone.com/korg.htm

Hope this helps.

Ashamed to say, it never occured to me to search SZ first... duh!

Thanks Nigel!

Success!

I searched on the net, downloaded various librarians, etc, did the same on SynthZone.

MidiOx as the SysEx manager, after quite a few attempts all data were there.

Used an SoundBlaster midi cable a friend had made for me with schematics I provided in 1994... still works.

Thanks everyone.

And now you've got the original sounds back in, you can try loading some of the extensive user created sounds that are available on the net, too...