Feedback on a project idea

Questions
1

Next week I’m having surgery, and I’ll be recovering for a handful of weeks. So I’m trying to think of a project I can work on during that time that won’t be too mentally taxing. I already have a major project I’m in the middle of, but that requires far too much concentration and focus. So I’m looking for something that will be doable within a 4-6 week time frame, probably working only a few hours a day.

The last few days I’ve been playing around with SC’s wavetable functionality. Coincidentally, I’ve also been running across a lot of posts related to old Ensoniq gear recently. I think the 80s craze has made people interested in things like the Mirage, ESQ 1, and EPS line of samplers/sequencers again. My first bit of gear was an EPS 16+ actually. Anyway, I started thinking it would be fun to build something inspired by the ESQ 1.

I won’t be trying to precisely model every part of the ESQ 1. For example, it had specific analogue filters that everything ran through. I won’t bother trying to emulate the exact sound of those filters. It was also an 8-bit machine, and I don’t know how to emulate that kind of low bit rate (but if anyone knows how to do that, that would be cool!). Some things that I think could be emulated fairly easily are it’s overall architecture. This is an article from the 80s that was written when it first came out. It explains how things are set up, like:

The ESQ-1 is an 8-note polyphonic (more than one note at a time), polytimbral (more than one sound at a time) MIDI synthesizer. It employs 3 oscillators per voice, each one capable of playing any of 32 different waveforms (which include sampled sounds and synthetically created waveforms with special harmonic content). There are also 4 independent velocity-controlled 8-stage envelopes and 3 individual LFOs per voice…

This website has samples from the ESQ 1, although only at one pitch for each sample, and in 16 bits. I don’t know if this is all of the original samples (I’ll have to do a bit more research first). It would be fun to only use the original samples, or mix them with SC’s UGens, like SinOsc, LFSaw, etc.

Anyway, what do you all think? Has anyone tried emulating a synth from this era before?

2

For bit-depth reduction check out Decimator in Sc3Plugins!

3

Ah, forgot to mention I’m using Supriya, the Python API for SC. So I don’t have access to everything in SC (especially the plugins and extensions).

4

Someone did give me this code snippet to do bit crushing, though:

// Fractional bit crushing
{ |input, bits=4.5|
  var levels = 2.pow(bits);
  (input * levels).round / levels
}
1 Like