Korg M3: Copying a program's effects and KARMA settings to a combi


You have added a program to a combi, but the program does not sound the same in the combi as it did when you were auditioning the program over in it's original program bank. In some cases, the program added to your combi might sound extremely different.

This happens because a large part of the original program's sound is due to its effects settings and its KARMA settings, but these are not copied with a program when you add it to a combi to prevent overwriting the combi settings that you might have painstakenly made so far.

There is a menu command that enables you to selectively copy any of the following attributes of the original program to the combi, so that the program will sound the same in the combi as it did when you auditioned the program in its original program bank:

  • IFX, MFX, and TFX settings (all three or any combination of these, and overwrites the combi's corresponding IFX, MFX, and TFX settings)
  • KARMA settings and Pad 1-8 settings (into any of the four KARMA modules in the combi that you specify, overwrites the combi's Master RTC layer, and overwrites the combi's current Pad 1-8 settings)
  • Drum track (overwrites the combi's current drum track settings)
  • RADIAS Vocoder parameters if the source program is a RADIAS program (overwrite's the combi's current RADIAS Vocoder parameters)

Warning: As the preceding list shows, using the menu command to copy over any of these settings will overwrite the corresponding settings on the combi itself. For this reason, it's best to experiment with the effects of this command before you spend too much time working on the combi's effects settings, KARMA Master RTC layer slider/switch assigments, or Pad 1-8 settings.


  1. From the page menu within a combi, select Copy from Program.
  2. In the Program field, select the program from which you want to copy settings into the combi.
  3. Use the checkboxes to select the specific settings that you want to copy into the combi.
  4. In the To field:
    1. Specify the target timbre that contains the program that you originally added manually per the scenario above. (You can also select a completely different timbre if for some reason you want to transfer the effects/karma/etc settings from one program to a completely different program within the combi, but this is an edge case.)
    2. In the Module field, specify which KARMA module to copy the KARMA settings to, if applicable. Note that the module's output channel will be automatically set to the channel of the timbre that you selected in the previous step.
    3. In the Drum Track field, specify whichever timbre is used for the combi's Drum Track (usually Timbre 10), if applicable.


  • See page 188-189 of the M3 Parameter Guide for more information.
  • There is no corresponding page menu command in the M3 Editor. So if you're setting up a new combi in the M3 Editor and need to do this:
    1. From the M3 Editor, write the combi to save your work so far on the M3 itself.
    2. On the M3, perform the above procedure and on the M3 itself, write the combi to save your changes on the M3.
    3. Back in the M3 Editor, use the Utility > Receive Current Combi command to reload the combi into the Editor.