Henry, it's a fine workstation, there , that being said here's the issue.
We buy these things in the stores, they tell us go home and produce, record and sell your own CD...It's that easy !
Well it ain't that easy..
recording is still an art and requires a few things up front, no matter how easy these manufacturers tell us it is or the guy in the store.
I suspect the biggest influence to your recording is the EQ settings . Take a look at the EQ patch that is selected, I would bet all of b0b's money that it is really tweaked HI in the mids...Look at your amp settings, I suspect that you, like most of us have similar settings which means the mids are very mild. Don't expect the same results with two different sets of EQ settings. Set the workstation EQ patch the same as your amp.
Rule 1, Record dry,( no effects) but that does not mean that you can't add an effect patch such as EQ or Delay to the singal as you are playing and recording, it is just not being added to the recorded track. The track is recorded DRY.
Rule 2, write your own patches for the Steel, especially the EQ settings. Strong mids or stock KORG EQ patches are mosy likely NOT Steel guitar friendly. Learn how to edit effects patches and store them in the library. When I edit mine I save them with real simple names, Steel 1, Steel 2, Tele 1, Tele 2 etc....even my wife can figure out what they are for
even me sometimes too
rule 3, spend time with the recorder without the Steel, I took my Yamaha AW2816 (beast ) on a road trip with me along with the manual a mic and a set of phones.
I sat down and wrote down what I wanted to accomplish, which was record on separate tracks, add them together, edit patches, listen back and add eihter my edited effects or stock effects to suit my needs. I took notes, made my own little cheat sheet with references to the BIG manual page numbers.
It's an education for sure, and time consuming, but worth the time and effort. Note I said I didn't learn the whole workstation, still haven't, I learned what I nneded to get going and then added features as I needed them. If the Korg is anything like the AW2816, there is more stuff on that machine than I will ever discover, stuff I don't even want to discover.
Ok, a simple tube preamp maybe with a limiter or peak protection on the front end will be way better than the DIGITAL only preamp of the Workstation, that will help warm things up. A $49 ART may do the trick, a $2000 Premap will obviously do it much better...
keep your average peaks at about -6db, 0 Db is for analog recorders, not Digital. 0 DB is the point where if you exceed it , the nasty digital saturation arrives.
The more clean signal you can capture without any effects the better off the end result will be. Spend time with your volume pedal, it is a compressor/Limiter eliminator.
Recording Steel is an art all by itself with all we have to do anyway...IF you have a preamp with a Limiter than that would be fine but I recommend NOT using a compressor on the input of your recordings. Learning how to use a compressor correctly could take longer than actually learning the workstation
Does the Korg have two effects engines which allows for two different effects at the same time on each channel ?
the bring em' home workstations are great tools, and they can really offer excellent results, but not without a few tricks and some time spent with them, they are little computors, we must learn how they function, even in the most basic form. thats the part they forget to tell you at the store.
Now take the day off from work and play with the Korg...A bad day of recording is still better than a good day at work !
t