From Brent Busby Sent Tue, Mar 27th 2018, 20:34
From Brent Busby Sent Tue, Mar 27th 2018, 20:34
I've purchased an Ensoniq Mirage rack (not arrived yet), because I
wanted to experiment with my own sampled waveforms and analog filters.
Partially my choice of the Mirage was because of the amount of money I
have to spend right now, not because it was necessarily the best choice
for this.
I am rather disappointed by its voice architecture though. It offers
two oscillator (sample playback) per voice, but there is only enough
independant control over the pitch of the second oscillator to allow for
chorus/detune type effects. There is one LFO, which can only send
triangle waves, and can only modulate the pitch of both oscillators.
(Basically it's hard wired to be a modulation wheel effect.)
Thankfully, the filter does have its own EG separate from the output
EG. It's 8-bit with playback rates as low as 8kHz, which should be
charaterful, and the filters are CEM chips, but still, it's awfully
hobbled and I would have liked more...like perhaps an SQ80 voice engine
where you supply your own waves.
It seems though that with sampler/synths you have to choose: You can
have a nice voice architecture, but digital filters, or you can have
analog filters and a very crude voice engine. The Korg DSS-1 is the
only exception I've seen, and frankly I haven't been impressed by the
actual sound of most of what I'm hearing in YouTube demos of it. (This
could very well just be the demos. I've found you have to really
actually have a piece of gear for at least six months to really find out
anything, and I've never had a DSS-1.) But there definitely seems to be
a real vacuum out there when it comes to samplers with deep voice
engines and real analog filters.
I've heard about an alternative third-party OS for the Mirage called
Sound Process that's supposed to hack in all sorts of things Ensoniq
never thought of, including 4-oscillator/sample per voice (sounds
promising), multitimbral/multitrack operation, etc...basically, some
keen soul with a lot of machine language coding expertise on the Mirage
has hacked it silly and created a whole new environment for it. The OS
disk is about $90 from Syntaur, so I think I'll want to check that out.
If DSI or some other manufacturer today wanted to fill a void in the
market that's really never been fully addressed though, not even in the
previous analog era in the 80's, they should make something with a
really good polyphonic voice engine with matrix type routing that has
some good analog hardware filters, but have the oscillators be sample
playback...preferably very low resolution sample playback, and you
supply the samples. To me, the problem with PPG/SQ80 style wavetable
has always been that they already chose the waves for me before I had a
chance to do anything. I want to have lots of EG's and LFO's, and have
analog filters, and supply my own waveforms...basically a Korg DSS-1
with great tone that can interface well with modern computers over USB.
--
- Brent Busby + ===============================================
+ With the rise of social networking
-- Studio -- + sites, computers are making people
-- Amadeus -- + easier to use every day.
----------------+ ===============================================