UPDATED The dead cat at the back of the cage
I’ve owned my ESQ-M since 1987, the year it came out. I’ve taken it all around the world and made a couple of albums with it. You have heard it on a few of the singles I made including Greater Reward. It’s why I use so many bell like sounds. My one is held together with rust and dried beer. It’s called BOOFHEAD.
This was terribly modern in 1987. It’s a bit like the Mirage, but with pre-recorded 8 bit waveforms, and a real honest filter and three oscillators, so you don’t tend to make Mirage cyber-vomits on it. You make sounds which are a little bit analogue and a little bit clangourous. It’s not really all the way to either a Juno or a DX7, it’s more like they had nasty sex and out popped this guy.
This box is part of my life, I have now carried it around for THIRTY NINE years. (Although to be honest, when desperately trading my keyboards for food in the bad years no one wanted this old guy or it might be gone.) Funny that something so long lasting and useful became invisible.
I turn it on regularly but I don’t use it much because there are now several virtual BOOFHEADs.
Virtual Boofheads
The first was SQ8L. I was impressed just how close the sounds are – as it uses the same 8 bit samples it means the hardware filter must be very closely matched – so much for authentic analogue. The software is for the SQ-80 which I owned for a while but that was a big surfboard and I hated that. You can design a sound on the software and (so long as you don’t use the extra SQ-80 waveforms) transfer the patch back to the hardware, where you can hear just how similar they sound.
I used the software on the Rhine album, because I know so well how to get what I want out of an ESQ-M and it sits neat and tidy just about anywhere. But the author died or went on a balloon ride, the VST is antique and it has taken a while for more recent software at arrive.
Arturia was next with a virtual SQ-80 adding odd waveforms and transwaves that showed up in later models. This is the most ‘augmented’ version of the instrument including bits of mangled data that can be teased out of a real SQ-80’s ROM. In some ways it’s not accurate, in other ways so what – you can find some real messy bits of noise by misusing the ROM and that would have been perfectly fine back in 1987.
Cherry have also made a ESQ-1 keyboard that is proud to be ‘authoritative’ and OK’ed by Creative Labs (who probably don’t give a damn). I’ve made a sys-x dump of my real ESQ-M and fed it into the Cherry ESQ. It sounds right, although a few patches needed a bit of tidying up to fix glitches. But then the Arturia one sounds pretty damn right as well, plus you can do more stupid stuff on that one.
For that reason I hereby endorse the Arturia version.
Hear the hardware In Action
A mix of TX81z, ESQm and MKS-100