MOSS Sessions revives the Korg Z1 with 64 modern presets

Roberto Macrì has put 64 modern programs on the Korg Z1 with The MOSS Sessions, a fresh bank that treats the 1997 flagship as a working instrument instead of a museum piece. The collection is aimed at today’s production styles and is meant to give the Z1 a more contemporary voice for both studio sessions and live sets.

That approach matters because the Z1 was never just another late-’90s preset machine. Korg built it around MOSS, the Multi-Oscillator Synthesis System, and the company’s own materials describe it as capable of moving from instrument imitation to far stranger sound generation. The Z1’s published specs list 13 oscillator types, 12-note polyphony, an optional jump to 18 voices with the DSPB-Z1 board, 256 programs in two banks, and a 61-note keyboard with velocity and aftertouch. In practice, that is the part of the machine Macrì is reviving: the expressive oscillator architecture, the physical-modeling side of the engine, and the synth’s ability to behave less like a rompler and more like a playable design tool.

Macrì describes the library as built to showcase the real power of the EXB-MOSS engine with a modern production approach. That is a pointed contrast to many older Z1 libraries, which still lean on late-1990s programming habits and sounds that feel locked to their original era. The new set is intended to give owners contemporary, instantly usable material while keeping the Z1’s motion, musicality and tactile response intact.

The Z1’s history makes that reappraisal easy to understand. Released in 1997 and widely seen as an extension of Korg’s earlier Prophecy, it earned a reputation as a deep, performance-oriented synth with a much wider palette than many of its contemporaries. For players who have left one sitting on the shelf, a bank like The MOSS Sessions is less about nostalgia than about seeing whether a neglected flagship can still justify rack space, desk space or keyboard stand space today.

The release also lands inside a broader wave of synth rediscovery, with the same news cycle touching a tribute to Vladimir Kuzmin and 880 free classic ESQ-1 presets. That wider context only sharpens the point here: the Z1 is being heard again not as a relic, but as an engine with enough range to earn another pass in a modern setup.