Once upon a time there was an American company called Ensoniq. You’ve likely heard the story of their rise and fall, if not I’ll pass you on to an outside source to cover the details. Given Ensoniq’s long creativity it’s a bit odd that the software vampires – Arturia, Cherry et al. have only just issued early period replicas. I would hate to think this was some kind of ‘oldest is bestest’ thing. OK sure – the ESQ-M was top dollar at its time. Still got mine. But hell – why are they so hesitant to pick up the crown prince of this magic kingdom – the FIZMO?
Physmo?
I remind you that this was planned to be a physical modelling synthesiser – the Physmo. But the company was not in a healthy place – a decision was made to fall back to the previous technology as seen on the MR Rack called transwaves. A crappy power supply, weird controls labelled F I Z M O for no useful reason … this thing tanked quickly.
Like so many inventions that are brilliant but stupid, it became cheap, then rare, before unobtainable. I was able to get a MR Rack and populate it with FIZMO wave chips, but nothing could fix the MR’s shitty confusing control system. I’d still buy a FIZMO if I was a rich man. Instead I’ve fallen back on software – and that’s where we start our documentation.
You may know that I managed to get a hold of transwaves in the FIZMO and converted them into wavetables. The difference is not great (and likely just to avoid copyright) – a wavetable is a set of waveforms that describe a smooth transition. To change the sound you move through the table. A transwave is instead one large audio sample with a fixed pitch that offers a sequence of frames. You can have different frame lengths so long as they are ratios of crossovers in the waveform.
PhizmOsc
I was recently surprised to see these samples being used in a free VST instrument PhizmOsc.
https://aquanode.gumroad.com/l/PhizmOscVST
Two tables can be scanned at one time, but their progress is modified by envelopes so that you create faster and slower movement through the tables. This gives a nice FIZMOish sparkle/burble that while not the whole story of the original instrument is enough to play the part in your musical adventures. There’s the usual filter and amp envelopes.
Interestingly enough this is a ‘vibe coded’ piece of software which implies some interesting tools may be emerging from non-programmers. The knobs are a bit odd I have to say, but they do work.
TranzWave
From that site I also learned about TranzWave which is a Kontakt Sampler instrument emulating the FIZMO. I’d normally run a 1000 miles from anything Kontakt as it often means a huge slab of G-byte samples plunked down on your machine. But it came recommended by and so needed a proper review. https://echograin.io/tranzwave/
Here’s the sell … “this method (transwave) offered a fresh and novel way to explore sonic possibilities, distinguishing it from the more digital and discrete transitions of previous wavetable synthesizers like the PPG Wave.” I’m not really sure what was fresh and novel about transwaves except that they avoided litigation from PPG. Unless I’m mistaken these waves are now samples played from the built in wavetable feature of Kontakt. – not very big samples as it loads quickly. That you can add your own wavetables tends to support this – you’re not adding multiple frames, but full tables.
But then the blurb reads “sampling each frame of these Transwaves” which implies that it is a multitude of individual wavetables… which would be authentic but not really noticeable…. in any case the sounds here are on par with my MR Rack and of impressive quality.
There are four oscillators at a time … a lot more voices available to stack and the interface is very handy for working out sounds – much more so than the original FIZMO. The FX are the same as in any Kontakt instrument but a version 2 now adds impulse responses from FIZMO hardware presets.
The interface is very pretty (fireworks!) and the load time not awful – and it can run on the Kontakt Player. I’m getting some very nice sounds quite quickly and all up having a good time in no time. This is better than a real FIZMO. So there.
I would buy this. Actually, I did.