KVR Audio

lordvader48 · Post by **lordvader48** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 7:32 pm

The Mirage Rules

People often get confused by the Mirage. The Mirage is a synth, not a sampler. It's kind of like an impressionistic painter, but with sound. You sample things into it, and a spotty-dotty weird representation of what went in is what comes out.

Anyone who thinks that "it's hard to make samples that sound good" on the Mirage is nuts. It's not hard - it's impossible. What the Mirage excels at is making samples sound BAD. If you want weird, unique sounds, nothing can touch it.

As far as being hard to use - nope. It's not hard to use at all. The biggest problem in that domain is that the documentation for the Mirage is pretty useless. But if you experiment for a while, and just work with sampling different things it really is not very hard to get the hang of it. There's just not that much there that has to be "gotten".

uvacom · Post by **uvacom** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 7:35 pm

> DiGiT < wrote:its 8 bit with some trickery in there to expand the dynamic range. forgot what its called.

oh and those filters are gorgeous!

If we're talking about the Mirage, the sample data is raw unsigned 8-bit floating point PCM. It is mentioned in the Advanced Sampler's Guide that in theory the Mirage has 20 bits of dynamic range because the 8-bit sample is multiplied with an 8-bit volume for each oscillator, and there are 16 oscillators (4 bits) which are all added together. But AFAIK the sample playback is 8 bits, straight no chaser.

I believe the SP-1200 may store it's amplitude values logarithmically (ulaw or somesuch), giving more resolution at greater amplitudes. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of?

wazun · Post by **wazun** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 7:46 pm

uvacom wrote:
wazun wrote:Hi,

does anybody have a mirage sampler and could be so nice and sample this
small drumloop ( http://www.wonderlabs.de/testloop.wav) for me?
I'd like to evaluate the sound of the machine for drum sound before I
try to buy one.

Thanks!
Sorry it took so long - here is your loop, played through the Mirage at a few different pitches.

http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~cclimer/Mirage.mp3

Thanks you very much !!!

shamann · Post by **shamann** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 8:11 pm

uvacom wrote:http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~cclimer/Mirage.mp3

Wow, noisy. Noisier than I expected.

uvacom · Post by **uvacom** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 8:39 pm

shamann wrote:
uvacom wrote:http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~cclimer/Mirage.mp3
Wow, noisy. Noisier than I expected.

Yeah, and that's importing into the mirage via MIDI sample dump! If I had used the analog input, it would have been noisier.

jmh · Post by **jmh** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 9:09 pm

Noisy indeed, but in a damn nice way.

Gotta do something similar with Sonitex

xoxos · Post by **xoxos** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 11:55 pm

WilliamK wrote:I had one too, but as far as I know, its 12 bits, not 8 bits, right?

Wk

the black one was 8 bits, the gray one 12

most of the ensoniq samplers had a 'bug' where affecting some parameter in loop mode (for me it was changing the loop points while playing a loop) produced randomly scattered segments from throughout the entire sample, eg. used in skinny puppy's 'jackhammer' track.

i met a rackmount that didn't do this, and as said have heard other modules produced same but under different conditions.

but honestly i'd just say 'lofi sampling with analog filter' and get busy making tracks instead of tracking down esoteric and bulky pieces of gear, but g'head and satisfy yourself.

WilliamK · Post by **WilliamK** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 11:57 pm

I got the gray one.

The sound was good, the only reason I sold mine was that it was hard to use, and couldn't stand the floppy-disks anymore.

Wk

Rune L-H · Post by **Rune L-H** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 12:17 am

jmh wrote:Noisy indeed, but in a damn nice way.

Gotta do something similar with Sonitex

I know this really isn't the topic, but for the heck of it I just did a quick session with Sonitex based on the audio clips in this thread

So here is a couple of short mp3 of Sonitex processing the original drumloop from the first post:

Based on the first bar in the Mirage clip uvacom posted: Test 1
And a slighty harder driven variation: Test 2

Best regards,
Rune

uvacom · Post by **uvacom** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 12:28 am

xoxos wrote:
WilliamK wrote:I had one too, but as far as I know, its 12 bits, not 8 bits, right?

Wk
the black one was 8 bits, the gray one 12

If we're talking about the Mirage, there was no 12 bit version. They were all pretty much the same, the later produced units lacked the expansion port, but they had pseudo-stereo outputs (I think one channel was just delayed to get a stereo effect, stereo samples were never supported).

The EPS had 12 bit resolution, though.

jmh · Post by **jmh** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 7:04 am

Rune

Kingston · Post by **Kingston** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 7:15 am

at Rune's direction.

mao · Post by **mao** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 7:25 am

I'm really wondering why you want a mirage, It's so a limitated sampler... If you want to mangle samples there are a lot of funny groove box out there, with bit reduction, syncing and so on... If you want a very good sampler, with fx, and powerful synth engine go for a 2nd hand Kurzweil K2000 with (with sample board),It samples very well, It reads a lot of format (eps, mirage, akay ...) and it's a awesome synth.

bye !

ensoniq mirage