About a year ago we acquired a beautiful Emulator II and a huge stack of 5.25" floppies containing a wealth of sounds, from genre-defining staples to some real oddities. Obviously our plan was to sample away and end up with a huge stack of Kontakt patches where the floppies used to be
We've been hard at work on this for some months now, and the results are starting to show. The Kontakt stack is growing, the Floppy stack is shrinking. But it's taking a long time simply because we took the view early on that, if we were going to do this, we ought to do it properly. That has meant:
- • Proper sampling from the EII itself, not batch-converting Emulator files (seriously, these abominations actually exist
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• Sampling every single note across the 5-octave range. A lot of the EII's character comes from its interpolation, and we wanted to preserve every detail of that, not have Kontakt interpolate for it.
• Taking long samples to preserve the character of the original looping, plus any LFO or filter activity the EII was generating.
• Using velocity-switching and velocity-morphing as necessary to preserve the behaviour of patches that relied on that (for cross-switching samples, or for opening the filter).
We've also finalised the feature set and GUI, which looks like this:
As you can see, we've added some controls to allow you to sculpt the EII's patches, but we've also put a nice big VINTAGE button in there which, when pressed, disables all the modern bells and whistles – the filter, the LFOs, the envelopes, the effects – and serves you up just the raw sound of the original EII patch. We're hoping that's the best of both worlds – control, plus authenticity if you want it.
Now to the reason for the post. Although we've got a LOT of instruments in the bag, there remain a LOT more on the disks that we could work our way through. Some of these are of course repeated variations on a given sound (so far we have quite a lot of orchestral Strings patches, for example; we even found two separate Steel Drum soundsets!). Now, we could pick and choose from these and just sample a representative selection, which would mean a smaller download size and (if we're fair, which sometimes we are) a cheaper product.
On the other hand, we could sample the whole damn lot, which would yield a very comprehensive library – a kind of "Emulator II Complete" – but would mean a hefty file size on download, a higher price-point (by our standards, I mean – it would still likely be under £100), and a longer wait (if you're the impatient type). So before embarking on any further sampling, we basically just wanted to ask the following:
How many Emulator II instruments do you want?!
A huge, era-spanning Emulator II library in all its 8-bit companded goodness? A leaner collection of handpicked sounds, trusting to our good judgement? Let us know your thoughts. We're going to stick a poll on this one, but please do weigh in in the comments so we know what you're thinking. We'd really like to get this one right – the EII is quite simply one of our favourite machines (ever since Ferris Bueller bunked off school courtesy of its "phlegm FX" disk) and without getting all mushy, we feel a kind of duty of care to its legacy. So... talk to us
Best wishes,
The Professor (and Mongo)
)) of all the sounds for those that may want it and from that breakout the smaller instrument specific libraries for those that would want that.
In fairness, though, there aren't all that many EII patches in it, and they're not chromatically sampled (which I think is important to get the sound of the EII's interpolation).
