Of course I’m going to give a great review to an emulation of something I’ve loved for years. Or am I?
First was the Ensoniq Mirage rack. 8 bit samples, hexadecimal and fuck you buddy. Sometimes I really miss that thing and hope the guy that stole it got COVID thirty years early. But then came the ESQ-m which I still have and is all over every record I made that people actually bought in shops. Racks are good, big hunking keyboards are bad – I owned an SQ80 for about a year but passed it on because I need to keep space for a bed to sleep on.
There has already been a software SQ8L by Siegfried Kullmann. It is mysterious how it appeared, was about to go commercial and then he died or was made pope or something – no one knows. This is a truly great title – it talks directly to the hardware like an editor and sounds identical. But it’s old and 32-bit, never going to be updated. Bit of a chore to keep it running.
Now Arturia have somehow wrested the intellectual property of the long defunct Ensoniq from Creative Labs – god bless them. Remember that when Arturia creates an emulation it is worthy, but when they break the emulation, the features they add or augment makes their stuff sweet. They have screwed with the SQ80 and it is a GOOD THING.
- There are TRANSWAVES taken from the VFX, which I guess wasn’t as popular and so no VFX-V. Where you have transwaves you can have later Ensoniq things. Just imagine a FIZMO some day.
- Even when the waves are static they can be distorted in ways that work very nicely.
- And some odd hidden waves are here, which basically means all the left over bits of string that (to be honest) are pretty useless but HEY.
- All of these I guess are the “hundreds more we have added”, a puzzling claim on the face of it.
- There’s a lot more modulation points and a modulation mixer.
- The oscillators can be detuned as if you machine needs service. My machine is a billion years old and needs no damn service thank you.
- There are effects (but not Ensoniq crazy effects like the DP4 which is SAD).
And it’s really easy to patch – cool.
Now back to that previous SQ8L. I’ve made some noises on my hardware ESQm hardware that are a bit extreme – the SQ8L is able to emulate these patches with no problem. The SQ80V however just can’t reach the grunge and grain of these few patches, it sounds muted and ashamed. It seems to be something to do with the Amplitude Modulation, but I’m really not sure yet. But this falls into the realm of synthesiser athletics, so I’m not going to worry about it too much, except to say the SQ80V is not quite finished yet.
Anyway it’s a no brainer for me and definitely worth a peek from you.