{"id":1550,"date":"2023-04-03T08:16:54","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T08:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/?page_id=1550"},"modified":"2024-05-18T06:32:49","modified_gmt":"2024-05-18T06:32:49","slug":"ensoniq-asr-10","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/ensoniq-asr-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Ensoniq ASR-10m \ud83e\uddfb\ud83e\uddfb\ud83e\uddfb\ud83e\uddfb"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>
\n

The Homebake music festival 1998.<\/strong> What are these boxes? From the bottom up:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

~ 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<\/a>. Wobble wobble.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

What made the Advanced Sampling Recorder so important? Pedigree. While the AKAI S612<\/a> was the first affordable sampler it was a very limited beast, a foot pedal with MIDI. Ensoniq’s Mirage<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> and MKS80 all mixed direct to DAT. This is a familiar work method now – it wasn’t 30 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The internal effects are extremely sophisticated for the day (soon appearing on the DP-4 effects unit), and the 3rd party Waveboy<\/em> effects<\/a> added strange things you couldn’t get elsewhere. The ASR-10 has modulation of the loop point for many experimental outcomes and transwaves<\/em> – a sample format that works like wavetables. These were a bit tricky to make your own but you could<\/em> and they could sound much like a PPG. Samples can be stacked 8 layers high and modulated by multiple modules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To sum it up – things that you expect from DAWs and samplers now<\/em> were available on the ASR back then<\/em>. This was the high moment of the end of a period of sampling<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1998 was unfortunately a very lean time. I sold my ASR-10 a few years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[7,18],"class_list":["post-1550","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","tag-sampler","tag-sold"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}