The Homebake music festival 1998. What are these boxes? From the bottom up:
~ A rubber pig mask.
~ ASR-10m Sampler. God bless it. It was called ETHEL 6.
~ Super VHS videotape deck for the visuals, which gives you the scale of the sampler.
~ SyQuest drive which supplied the samples over SCSI back in the day. Note that MasterCard is welcome here – as is the old Australian BankCard.
~ Balanced precariously on top of it all is a CASIO CZ-101. Wobble wobble.
What made the Advanced Sampling Recorder so important? Pedigree. While the AKAI S612 was the first affordable sampler it was a very limited beast, a foot pedal with MIDI. Ensoniq’s Mirage was only 8-bit, but that grunge and hexadecimal was part of the charm – and there was an analogue filter. Ensoniq got much right at the start and over the years their EPS, EPS16+ and ASR-10 were (in my opinion) more sophisticated than the AKAI and Roland machines of the time. (I did actually use a Roland MKS100 sampler for a while. Quick Discs. It was horrible).
When the ASR-10 is fully expanded to 16Mb there’s enough memory to load up a few minutes of stereo audio. You can also record to hard drive. When my 16-track tape recorder died in 1993 I went full digital – creating entire songs with vocals, percussion and all the real world instruments played by the ASR along with an Oberheim Xpander and MKS80 all mixed direct to DAT. This is a familiar work method now – it wasn’t 30 years ago.
I could also create a track to perform live with the ASR and then bring it back to the studio to develop further, negotiating the two worlds with the same instrument. This enabled a change of musical style.
The internal effects are extremely sophisticated for the day (soon appearing on the DP-4 effects unit), and the 3rd party Waveboy effects added strange things you couldn’t get elsewhere. The ASR-10 has modulation of the loop point for many experimental outcomes and transwaves – a sample format that works like wavetables. These were a bit tricky to make your own but you could and they could sound much like a PPG. Samples can be stacked 8 layers high and modulated by multiple modules.
To sum it up – things that you expect from DAWs and samplers now were available on the ASR back then. This was the high moment of the end of a period of sampling, as the concept changed soon after and the follow ups ASR-X (a groovebox) and Paris (a DAW) had little in common with the previous box.
1998 was unfortunately a very lean time. I sold my ASR-10 a few years later.
Is it just nostalgic when I think back to the Ensoniq Sampler EPS, EPS16+ and ASR 10? Musically they were definitely impressive and what was possible with the memory was impressive. Sometimes less is more. The loop options and internal sequencers have never been so well solved for my taste. It’s a shame that the workstation concept has somehow been lost in hardware synths.
“Chapeau?” Ensoniq’s: Albert (Al) J. Charpentier, David B. Crockett, Robert (Bob) Yannes for the ingenious developments.