03.19.10
Posted in Instruments at 6:52 pm by Administrator
I put these two together because they are both products on Ensoniq, an American company that flourished in the ’80′s but didn’t survive.
The Mirage was the first affordable sampler..8 bit with a cryptic 2 Digit interface that belied the complexity of what lay beneath the hood. It took 3.5 ” floppy discs and came with a pretty impressive (for its time) library.
We used this for horns,strings,orchestral hits,drums,vocal samples..anything. It made great use of release velocity, a sadly underused feature before and since in other synths.
The ESQ-1 came a year later in 1986…it was multi-timbral,had 120 sounds(!) and a built in,really usable sequencer. My partner Kevin and I each had one and we got a lot of mileage out of them.
He constructed the whole intro and basic part of “When The Radio Is On” for Paul Shaffer with it.
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03.17.10
Posted in What's New at 8:30 pm by Administrator
It’s nice to get things in the mail…those guys from the band Bracia in Poland (and their manager Marcin) just sent Keith Brown and me some copies of their new CD. We co-wrote two of the songs with them:
11. Zapamiętaj
12. Jeszcze raz
although I’m not really sure what the new lyrics mean….
Great band..and super nice guys..we had a blast working with them.
Hopefully, they’ll make it stateside sometime soon.
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Posted in Instruments at 8:23 pm by Administrator
This was the secret weapon…..slightly larger than a Melodica with a power supply that weighed as much as the keyboard, this little beat rocked the high and low end. It was great for bells and chimey stuff but it really earned its stripes on the bottom end..it was a bass machine. Of course,you’d never know it from the presets.. the usual suspects of “demo” sounds that made you think..”oh,yeah, Casio..the digital watch makers..”. But with a little time programming,you could get really deep and amazingly percussive bass sounds (wicked fast pitch envelopes). The keys on the keyboard were only sightly larger than Chicklet gum so you had to use a MIDI connection to play it. Response time through MIDI was laser quick and it was a pretty roadworthy piece, considering that it was probably 100% plastic. I think that there were 16 user memory slots and you could save your own sounds via SYSEX (computer).
I’m not sure if the CZ-101 qualify as “vintage” (yet)..but I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time before eBay bidding goes through the roof.
I later “traded up” for the CZ1…same voice architecture but with full sized keys,velocity,more memory…but the “fun factor” was missing.
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