ENSONIQ: Let's talk about this great American synth manufacturer

[jerrythek]

15 minutes ago, LarsHarner said:

I remember they were in Malvern PA- wasn't there some connection with someone from Commordore computers? I thought they were from there as well.

The three founders all came from Commodore computer. Look up the story - it’s easily found. 

[Dave Bryce]

4 hours ago, jerrythek said:

Did you know a gent named John McCubbery? Worked for a guy named Sperry who ran our local distribution there.

Sperry Grupetta, from Electric Factory if memory serves.  They were also the Alesis distributor. 😎

 

dB

[Werno]

Somewhere in my attic is an Apple IIe containing an Ensoniq Drum-Key 'expansion card', which might have been Ensoniq's first product back in the... mid-80s? I think a Keyboard mag review was what inspired me to buy it. The software put a glowing green grid on the IIe's screen whereon one could plant dots to trigger the extremely lo-res drum samples on the card. It was a fun intro to drum programming, especially for anyone whose tastes run to muffled truncated mono samples. It inspired, if that's the word, numerous porta-studio instrumental wankathons. A couple decades baking in the attic have probably finished it off by now.

 

A couple months ago I stumbled across the xeroxed 'manual' but now, of course, nowhere to be found. The 'Drum-key' gets a brief name-check at the beginning of this 'History of Ensoniq' page-  https://feedfreq.com/music-production/the-history-of-ensoniq/

[Reezekeys]

1 hour ago, jerrythek said:

But back then, with such small memory, we really couldn’t do it justice. To be candid, I didn’t care for our pianos either

 

I believe the Mirage piano fit into 256K of memory -- which iirc was the total amount the Mirage had for samples. I'm sure it was a struggle to find an acceptable compromise between # of samples, sample lengths, and how many semitones to stretch them. Didn't really matter - to a struggling musician who couldn't dream of affording an Emulator 2, this was the only alternative!

[Delaware Dave]

1 hour ago, jerrythek said:

We released a Bosendorfer on our CDR-3 collection, maybe it was also on floppies. It certainly came from a real Bosendorfer piano. The one in George Duke’s studio. 
 

But back then, with such small memory, we really couldn’t do it justice. To be candid, I didn’t care for our pianos either. 
 

The Rhodes in the MR-Rack was my personal unit. I liked that! 😉

 

It would be a pretty boring world if we all liked the same sounds, the same music, the same food. 

 

I still have all of the CD's and using AWAVE was able to load alot of their sounds into my Gem Equinox and of course the TS12.

[ProfD]

Great example of an unrealistic piano sound becoming iconic is the M1 piano heard on so many records in the 1990s.

 

I believe if it hasn't ready, the M1 piano is a candidate to become General MIDI sound.🤣

 

Back in the day, those Ensoniq sampled sounds were perfect in the studio and on stage for music producers and gigging musicians.😎

[jpkeys]

Wow, Jim, that brings back some memories. My first exposure to Ensoniq was a friend's Mirage in 1985 or so that blew me away. I was considering buying one, then the ESQ-1 came out so I picked one up. Different and cooler than the other synths I had at the time (Polysix, Sequential Pro-One, CZ-101). Gigged with the ESQ-1 and a TX7 for a bit. A couple of years later, '88 or so, I was in a music store looking at the digital pianos that hit the market. I was underwhelmed by most. Then I heard someone playing a keyboard nearby that caught my attention and sounded really good. I walked over, and it was an SQ-80! Probably the same piano sample as my ESQ-1! Funny how that works. My last Ensoniq board was a KS-32 purchased new in 1992. I loved that thing! Had a hard shell SKB case for it, together was probably 75 lbs. My back hurts thinking about it.

 

And, yes, I knew of the tie between Ensoniq and Commodore. I had a C64 and later an Amiga. My first sequencers were on those. Dr. T's KCS anyone?

[jerrythek]

3 hours ago, Dave Bryce said:

Sperry Grupetta, from Electric Factory if memory serves.  They were also the Alesis distributor. 😎

 

dB

Yup. 

[jerrythek]

2 hours ago, Reezekeys said:

 

I believe the Mirage piano fit into 256K of memory -- which iirc was the total amount the Mirage had for samples. I'm sure it was a struggle to find an acceptable compromise between # of samples, sample lengths, and how many semitones to stretch them. Didn't really matter - to a struggling musician who couldn't dream of affording an Emulator 2, this was the only alternative!

And yet, I remember when I was still at Casio and first heard that Mirage piano sound. It was amazing for the time/money. 

[jerrythek]

3 hours ago, Werno said:

Somewhere in my attic is an Apple IIe containing an Ensoniq Drum-Key 'expansion card', which might have been Ensoniq's first product back in the... mid-80s? I think a Keyboard mag review was what inspired me to buy it. The software put a glowing green grid on the IIe's screen whereon one could plant dots to trigger the extremely lo-res drum samples on the card. It was a fun intro to drum programming, especially for anyone whose tastes run to muffled truncated mono samples. It inspired, if that's the word, numerous porta-studio instrumental wankathons. A couple decades baking in the attic have probably finished it off by now.

 

A couple months ago I stumbled across the xeroxed 'manual' but now, of course, nowhere to be found. The 'Drum-key' gets a brief name-check at the beginning of this 'History of Ensoniq' page-  https://feedfreq.com/music-production/the-history-of-ensoniq/

Originally called the Pro-Cussion. Bob Yannes told me a funny story about developing it. Before they had any sounds for it, they tested with some chip that was used for car systems for a speaking voice. So as you played patterns it “said” things like door… key… door… key. 
😅

[kram21]

Big fan Of Ensoniq KS32-purchased in 1992-at the time had the best B3sounds than any other KB IMO,as well as awesome electric and acoustic pianos and synth sounds(could get realistic Van Halen synth tones with it ie."When its Love"  Jump," When Love Walks In"). Then 2yrs later i midi"ed the Korg Micro piano for even better acoustic/ electric pianos.

[kram21]

I could layer 4 different sounds to get the tone of VH "   When it's Love" on the KS31

[kpl1228]

I was on the road with a Mirage during its heyday....drummer used to throw his sticks in the air as part of his show and I would throw my 3.5" discs in the air when he did. Whatta show!

I had 15 discs all stacked up on the side of it. Youd see me on stage in the middle of some Tears for Fears cover song rifling through my discs looking for the right one.

Good basic sampling....great for effects. a surprisingly serviceable piano. But my first Mirage was the original series and man that keyboard was AWFUL. Spongier than a sponge!

Original Mirage plus a flight case. As I've often said, birthday cards with recorded messages on them today have better technology, for 1/2000th of the price!

Never had the ESQ-1 or SQ80, but was always impressed with its giant display screen and your ability to choose from 6-8 songs with the entire bank displayed. That idea would still fly today performing live.

[Reezekeys]

1 hour ago, jpkeys said:

My first sequencers were on those. Dr. T's KCS anyone?

 

Oh yea. Maybe this should be another thread (although you & I might be the only KCS folk here!). I used the Atari ST version and had pretty much every "MPE" module for it up to the end (around 1995 I think?). I got into Omega's "PVG" and also used the "Songedit" and "Mixer" modules, and had the "Phantom" SMPTE synchronizer as well - I used that with my Tascam 388 to do a few CD projects. I also used an app called T-Basic to make MPE modules for more specialized editing.

 

If you use a Mac, there's an emulator called "Hatari" that's updated for Apple Silicon and runs KCS/Omega! I've synced it to Logic and Digital Performer. It's close but not perfect timing-wise - I use KCS for composing, then transfer the midi to the more modern sequencer when I'm done.

 

IMHO, the midi editing offered by the 2.0 version of Tiger (not sure if that made it to the Amiga) was equal to anything out there today.

 

We now return you to your scheduled thread topic... sorry for the divert everybody!

[The Real MC]

6 hours ago, jerrythek said:

But back then, with such small memory, we really couldn’t do it justice. To be candid, I didn’t care for our pianos either. 

 

Ah, OK.  So memory was the limiting factor.  Multi-samples of a single piano are very memory intensive.

[Tom Williams]

Regarding EPS features I would have liked to see from Kurzweil, I no longer have either of my EPS's, but if memory serves:

• Rompler/keymap functions that should be trivial (Perhaps the first one is already there):
  • Sample begin point modulation, which allowed things like marcato / legato articulation of string and brass samples
    • If I remember right, Kurzweils can only modulate by a few bytes, instead of anywhere in the entire sample
  • Loop begin and end modulation, which lets you build your own transwaves (and do other harm if you want it)
     
• In-keyboard sampling, of course.  After all, we clearly have audio inputs that can be routed somewhere.
  • three or four models for generating crossfade loops from non-symmetric samples
     
• Non-sampling playability features:
  • polyphonic aftertouch in the keybed
  • a non-random polyphonic portamento that could be activated with the damper pedal.
     
• Someone like Waveboy -- an Ensoniq employee who they allowed to do extracurricular OS tweaks that benefitted the user community.
  • Oh wait -- we do have Dave Weiser.  Close enough.  🙂

Don't misunderstand -- I am now as big a Kurzweil fanboy as I ever was for Ensoniq.  But the above items seem to be old enough technology that I would have expected the Kurzweils to include all of them, and more.  (Easy for me to say, as all that stuff is a magical black box to me anyway.)

[The Real MC]

Polyphonic aftertouch - I knew I was forgetting something.

That was a very cool feature for the Ensoniq keybeds.  And a simple implementation too - novel enough to earn a patent.

[Konnector]

I had two ASR-10 samplers with all the available bells and whistles, SCSI, output expander, max ram, etc. I used them mostly to make multi-velocity layered acoustic drums. I recorded my own kits and squeezed as many samples into them as I could for a realistic drum kit sound. Sounded awesome. (Also did the same with guitars, among other things.) This was long before anything like BFD, EZ Drummer, Slate drums, etc. existed. It was well worth the effort back then as it filled a big need for me. 

 

I sold them recently after much hesitation when prices went through the roof. I no longer had any need for them so in the end it was a good decision.

 

If I want to get real grungy I still have an old Akai sampler which has a great lo-fi flavor that wasn't possible with the hi-fi sounding ASR-10.  

[YashN]

12 hours ago, Tom Williams said:

Regarding EPS features I would have liked to see from Kurzweil, I no longer have either of my EPS's, but if memory serves:

• Rompler/keymap functions that should be trivial (Perhaps the first one is already there):
  • Sample begin point modulation, which allowed things like marcato / legato articulation of string and brass samples
    • If I remember right, Kurzweils can only modulate by a few bytes, instead of anywhere in the entire sample
  •  
• Someone like Waveboy -- an Ensoniq employee who they allowed to do extracurricular OS tweaks that benefitted the user community.

 

Thanks Tom, that helps. I think going into more details around the Ensoniq features for Transwaves and Hyper-Waves or Wave-Lists and related realtime-control would help even more. I was reading about the movement of Start and End at the same time or something like Loop-Start and End at the same time and I think I saw that with that specific setting, the Sample Start would then begin at the Loop Point. Knowing how things work in Ensoniq-land and the sonic results and application can help us programmers reach a similar thing on the Kurzweil even if it's not precisely the same. More often that not, if you get close sonically, it's more than enough and there's no need to match the exact spec. These are useful pursuits, and I actually like to do that kind of thing.

 

Robin on YT provides some in depth navigation for setting up Transwaves and more but it quite heavy on the menu-diving and hard to follow for someone who has no Ensoniq to practice on. Likewise, just reading the manuals isn't enough to really understand what the Sample-specific features do.

 

https://www.youtube.com/@RoshiAi

 

For Sample Start, the real-time Control over it (the change is only actually heard via Key re-trigger though) can be set to really fine control by using the Continuous Mode. This span can be as long as the sample itself by default and there's possibility of even going above one or two of the boundaries if it's Sample ROM. So definitely not just a few bytes here. Map the Control to the Long Ribbon in single Ribbon mode and you can operate over very fine increments.
 

For OS Tweaks, that won't happen unless someone really gets into it on their own and hacks the O.S. and re-generates the checksum without breaking anything. Non-trivial and does require having some experience in at least prior experience in coding those features. What would be interesting here is to modify the MIDI implementation to do internal re-Channeling for several voices, i.e. internal MPE. This might be easier than making modifications to the Sample / Keymaps features though. I don't know if optimisations in this section could help getting a higher control rate (technically, yes) and whether that would break things elsewhere even if someone managed to do this. Then there's the issue of making the values accessible to the UI. I have more ideas for OS tweaks.

 

However, you don't really need to change the O.S. itself to heavily modify the capabilities of V.A.S.T. workstations: customising objects themselves can go a very long way.

[Tom Williams]

30 minutes ago, YashN said:

Thanks Tom, that helps. I think going into more details around the Ensoniq features for Transwaves and Hyper-Waves or Wave-Lists and related realtime-control would help even more.

In lieu of pictures, here's what I think of when I write about Transwaves.

• Start with sample source: a sawtooth at A440 with a wide filter sweep that lasts 288 ms or so. 
• Sample sample this; for arithmetical simplicity we'll call the sample rate 44KHz.
• One wave cycle is therefore 100 samples.
• Set the loop start at sample 1, length 100.
• set the mod wheel (or other mod source) to increment loop start and end points by 100 for each CC increment.
  • CC0: 1-100
  • CC1: 101-200
  • etc
• Now you can move between filter settings without consuming a filter. 

This can be used for other purposes too:  Crossfade between a rohrflute and a stringy diapason.  Do a phase shift.    Go from 88-800-0000 to 80-880-8008 drawbars and anywhere in between.  Start at the end of a Piano sample and modulate toward the beginning so you can start Roundabout correctly every time.  Whatever.  And it doesn't take up much memory (which was important back then), doesn't use an extra oscillator, doesn't use an extra filter, and can all be done with one modulation mapping on one multisample. 

 

 

[dazzjazz]

Check out this ESQ1 I found today in a Sydney used instruments store- it’s a Japanese release model and has these futuristic sloping end bells. It also has some kind of sequencer kit installed. 

[Cabo]

I had one of the original Mirages (terrible keybed) , then upgraded to the improved version.

 

I remember creating a bunch of my own samples and trading them with a few people.   They weren't very good quality.

 

Several months later, I saw an ad in keyboard for mirage samples and it listed the specific file names of the sounds that were for sale.  The guy I traded my samples with was selling them!

 

[YashN]

22 hours ago, Tom Williams said:

In lieu of pictures, here's what I think of when I write about Transwaves.

• Start with sample source: a sawtooth at A440 with a wide filter sweep that lasts 288 ms or so
• ...

 

And it doesn't take up much memory (which was important back then), doesn't use an extra oscillator, doesn't use an extra filter, and can all be done with one modulation mapping on one multisample.

 

Based on this description, I built a set of Wavetable Scanner Algorithms on the K2500 yesterday, some techniques of which I shared in an Advanced Programming Tutorial on Vector Synthesis and Wave Sequencing for the K2000, 30 years ago or so.

 

For memory use, in V.A.S.T., this is quite optimised already, so if the team offers us a way to build lists of pointers to internal Sample ROMs and to scan this, that would be great. If not, there's my method

 

More cool things can be implemented in conjunction with this on the Kurzweil but I won't burden this thread with it, might need a similar thread but for Kurzweil V.A.S.T. !

[My Keys And Me Are Vintage]

9 hours ago, dazzjazz said:

Check out this ESQ1 I found today in a Sydney used instruments store- it’s a Japanese release model and has these futuristic sloping end bells. It also has some kind of sequencer kit installed. 

Whoa! I thought I was a big early Ensoniq fan but I have never seen this version of the ESQ-1! Nice find! It has more than the sequencer expansion inserted? See anything different in the OS? Waves, Presets all the same? 

[dazzjazz]

There wasn’t time to try it as the shop was already closed, but the owner kindly reopened when he saw staring at all the vintage synths in the window: MonoPoly, MS10, Juno106, JX8P etc. I might go back to try it. 

[Radagast]

I had an original DX-7 and an ESQ-1, with which I got paid doing the music for a local commercial. Later I got the follow up to the ESQ-1, the SQ-80.  I still have a KT-76 because it has a gorgeous patch called “Big Money Pad”.

[Tom Williams]

10 hours ago, YashN said:

Based on this description, I built a set of Wavetable Scanner Algorithms on the K2500 yesterday, some techniques of which I shared in an Advanced Programming Tutorial on Vector Synthesis and Wave Sequencing for the K2000, 30 years ago or so.

Does VAST allow modulating loop position?  Did I miss that feature?  I'd love to be wrong about that! 🙂 

[YashN]

15 hours ago, Tom Williams said:

Does VAST allow modulating loop position?  Did I miss that feature?  I'd love to be wrong about that! 🙂 

 

I know some tricks Will have to wait for another thread another time.

[nmchiledude]

On 6/7/2024 at 3:04 PM, kram21 said:

Big fan Of Ensoniq KS32-purchased in 1992-at the time had the best B3sounds than any other KB IMO,as well as awesome electric and acoustic pianos and synth sounds(could get realistic Van Halen synth tones with it ie."When its Love"  Jump," When Love Walks In"). Then 2yrs later i midi"ed the Korg Micro piano for even better acoustic/ electric pianos.

Loved my KS32.  I may have had more fun on that keyboard than just about any I've owned. Back when I was cutting my teeth on electronic keyboards.

[tapes]

On 6/7/2024 at 3:40 PM, jerrythek said:

No Dr. Dre Signature Series. But yes to all those others. 

You sure? I’m talking about the ”L.A. Riot” series, volumes 1 & 2. There are definitely some patches/folders under his name.