SQ80 emulating VSTi available

[synthgeek]

The only thing I've ever wished was different about the ESQ-1 interface was that I'd like seperate knobs for each parameter on the display- and that's the case with this plug-in. I do agree with Olepro about the button vs. right-click issue for the parameter pages though.

[r_buchty]

The only thing I've ever wished was different about the ESQ-1 interface was that I'd like seperate knobs for each parameter on the display- and that's the case with this plug-in. I do agree with Olepro about the button vs. right-click issue for the parameter pages though.

Would be a nice hardware hack.

Just use your favorite microcontroller to scan 10 rotary dialers; once a dialer is moved, then send simulated keypresses (soft-button code plus the desired amount of INC/DEC codes) to the internal serial bus.

You don't even need to modify the ESQ1's OS or do any further hardware hack besides drilling the holes, attaching the pots, and programming that very microcontroller.

[Liquidclear]

Thanks you very much for your efforts, Sigfried! Soundwise, this is the synth of the year to me as I love the ESQ/SQ80 and use them in nearly every track I write.

I (and many others) will certainly be looking forward to the upcoming full version.

[tomg]

The only thing I've ever wished was different about the ESQ-1 interface was that I'd like seperate knobs for each parameter on the display- and that's the case with this plug-in. I do agree with Olepro about the button vs. right-click issue for the parameter pages though.

Would be a nice hardware hack.

Just use your favorite microcontroller to scan 10 rotary dialers; once a dialer is moved, then send simulated keypresses (soft-button code plus the desired amount of INC/DEC codes) to the internal serial bus.

You don't even need to modify the ESQ1's OS or do any further hardware hack besides drilling the holes, attaching the pots, and programming that very microcontroller.

You don't even need to learn assembly. Look at the PIC18F877 and PicBasic. You can build a programmer for $2. It would be real easy and fairly cheap, even if you had to pay $100 for the basic. If you didn't want to drill holes in the top of your ESQ you could always put a 25-pin connector on the back and mount the pots in an external box. Not that I would do it to my SQ80.

[mistertoast]

tomg,

Suppose someone wants to get started building little circuits with microcontrollers. How does one get started? Assembly code doesn't scare me. I just don't know how to start. Good reference books? Website?

Suppose I just want to flash some LEDs in a sequence? Or play an audio sample through a DAC? Or anything, really.

[r_buchty]

If you didn't want to drill holes in the top of your ESQ you could always put a 25-pin connector on the back and mount the pots in an external box. Not that I would do it to my SQ80.

Now, getting really off-topic, there's always the module slot which you can use to get cables in and out the system without drilling holes.

If you don't need the module slot, you can even plug your very own cable into the module slot PCB to carry all signals you want and plug your extensions of any kind right into the slot

(The SQ80 *is* a wonderful machine for hardware hacking of any sort -- cause you still have access to each and everything.)

[tomg]

tomg,

Suppose someone wants to get started building little circuits with microcontrollers. How does one get started? Assembly code doesn't scare me. I just don't know how to start. Good reference books? Website?

Suppose I just want to flash some LEDs in a sequence? Or play an audio sample through a DAC? Or anything, really.

There was a lot on the web but it's kinda died down. You can still Google for Pic projects and don't over look the AVR series. I've got some old projects that are pretty cool. One is a 3 LDR riff generator with internal speaker. You play it like a theremin by waving you hands at it. The whole thing fits in a little plastic box and runs on a 1.5V battery. I'll dig up some stuff later after I'm done with the bank transfers.

[tomg]

If you didn't want to drill holes in the top of your ESQ you could always put a 25-pin connector on the back and mount the pots in an external box. Not that I would do it to my SQ80.

Now, getting really off-topic, there's always the module slot which you can use to get cables in and out the system without drilling holes.

If you don't need the module slot, you can even plug your very own cable into the module slot PCB to carry all signals you want and plug your extensions of any kind right into the slot

(The SQ80 *is* a wonderful machine for hardware hacking of any sort -- cause you still have access to each and everything.)

[mistertoast]

I'm looking for basics. I assume I need a clock chip to drive the microcontroller (or is that now in the microcontroller?). I assume I need a ROM to hold the instructions. (And obviously a ROM burner to put the instructions in the ROM.) I'd like to see the simplest circuit that does something noticeable, then I could probably understand everything.

Way off topic, here, though. Sorry.

[AdmiralQuality]

One suggestion, the ESQ-1 allows you to center values by pressing both the Data Entry up and down arrow keys at the same time. Usually VSTis use ctrl-click on a knob for this same function, but SQ8L doesn't support this.

Great to have you guys here Ranier and Sigi. Welcome! How have you both managed to avoid KVR until now?

[audiojunkie]

Tomg, you (and the creators, of course), are awesome! I really look forward to the extra banks! I'm a patch junkie.

--Sean

[akademie]

... This brings up an interesting point about "emulations" - to be faithful to the original it often seems necessary to make many of the same mistakes that were made on the original (usually due to reduce manufacturing processes). But I'd almost always prefer IMPROVED interfaces since in the soft synth world we don't have these design and manufacturing restrictions. Sure the result will not be as "faithful" looking to the original, but the functionality of the new design can be a vast improvement and make the synth far more useful and powerful than the original!....

I think many times the design of user interface is the key to sound design of the instrument. I don't think that direct access to all available parameters at once is really what we have to have all the time (although it may seem very comfortable and really is), but the way you can access different groups of parameters may greatly affect how the sounds are programmed and that way how they sounds. Maybe it is the interface of SQ80 that is responsible for those lovely and recognisable sounds that we know "yeah that is that great ensoniq sound" and not only circuity design.
For example, take TB-303 (it's mostly its built-in sequencer that makes TB-303 that "cult", because if you start to play TB-303 synth engine using your 5 octave masterkeyboard, then it's only analog sounding synth. The character is made thanks to combination of given synth engine type together with the give controllers (knobs and sequencer) and also you could add FX line (delay and distortion) = then you have that famous TB-303 "sound".
It applies to other machines, too, I think.
I would vote for original design recreation (maybe even with the flaming non-steadily shining display to bring up that original atmosphere, you know :-)with some enhancements, like:

* direct access to pages - right click is really slowing down all process of editing

* better patch changing approach - when you reach patch 128, then you have to step back to 00 one-by-one

* allowing all parameters to be controlled by external device - that way you can have your all-parameters-at-once without forcing original graphical design to be changed.

Once again, great plugin.
(What about multitimbral and multiout version ??

akademie

[foosnark]

After a whole bunch of messing around going through all those banks, digging out the patches I care about and tweaking them, etc. -- I'd have to say I'd really like to be able to pick the waves via dropdown list. Deciding I want all three oscs to be triangle instead of saw means a lot of precision knob-fiddling, and it shouldn't

I don't know if I want to go through another grazillion patches, it's already taken me several hours to check out about 58 of the 75...

I've taken to pronouncing the name of this plugin "skwaytel"

[1-2-Many]

As for the GUI - Anyone else find the patch up down arrows seem backward?

edit clarification: To me, with the patches listed 00-127, the up arrow should move up the list (-), and the down arrow should move down (+)

[AdmiralQuality]

The interface on the ESQ-1/SQ80 wasn't really GOOD, but it was VERY GOOD in COMPARISON to other programmable synths of the day.

By 1986, when the ESQ-1 came out, most every synth manufacturer was trying to cut prices by leaving off all the knobs. Synths since the Prophet 5 (1977) no longer had knobs and sliders directly connected to the voice circuitry anyway... the knobs' positions were first digititized, so they could be stored in digital memory, and that numeric value in memory was converted to a suitable control voltage that was sent to the voice generating circuitry. So there was this disconnect that was brought on by adding the feature of programmable digital memory.

So the idea was, if you have say 20 parameters, why put 20 knobs on the front panel? That just drives the component count and costs up but doesn't make it sound one bit better. Yes, it looks cooler. Yes it's easier to edit. But would you rather save $1000 off the price of the synth? By 1983, most synth manufacturers were were choosing to go this route.

Yes, it's nicer to use if there's a knob for everything, like in the old days, but my JX-3P -- which was one of the first Roland synths to lose the knobs in favour of one data entry slider and a digital button system for selecting which parameter you were editing -- cost a LOT less than it would have if it had a knob for everything. (I forget but I think the price of the add-on PG-200 programmer module to provide a knob for everything added another 2/3 to the cost of the synth.) So, as I was a poor teenager at the time, I was happy to spend a few fractions of a second picking the parameter then adjusting the knob because if not for that, I couldn't have afforded a 2 oscillator per voice poly-synth and would have ended up with something like a single oscillator Juno-106 instead. This kind of programming became so second nature I hardly thought about it and after a short while didn't even need to look at the parameter map silkscreened on the panel to know which buttons to hit to get each parameter (and after not having a JX-3P for about a decade, I got one again last year and STILL remembered without looking!) The only thing you couldn't do was turn two knobs at once... but this doesn't really come up much in synth programming as you usually have one hand on the keyboard anyway.

So 1983 that was the worst case scenario and the "new normal". The synth market was VERY competitive during that decade. The DX-7 (also 1983), which was the synth to beat at the time, was pretty much the same thing, though at least it provided an LCD display for visual feedback.

The ESQ-1 however was a great leap forward, and borrowed a system used in jet fighter aircraft, where you have a much larger display screen that shows many labels, and the buttons to choose parameters are placed just off the screen next to the labels. The meaning of each button changes depending on which display screen page you're on. (This is also how most ATM/bank machines work.)

Nothing else (except jet fighters) had done this at the time. But it's a nice way to make an interface without a lot of sliders and many other synths have used something like it since (I had a Roland-XP-80 in the late-90s that heavily borrowed from this system).

One thing that's missing in the SQ8L however is the page selection buttons. In this VSTi you pick the page by right clicking then selecting the page from a drop down menu. But on the ESQ-1, the pages are each selected by a button... and those buttons are laid out in schematic form representing the audio and modulation paths in the voice. Just like the previous generation of knobby synths had laid out their controls in groups who's layout made sense topologically.

So that schematic REALLY helped you see that oscilators went to a mixer, mix output to VCF, VCF to VCA, etc...

Anyway, that said, I found the SQ8L to be instantly understandable (at least once I discovered through trial and error that the page buttons were on a right-click menu). But I've been programming ESQ-1s since they came out in 1986. Yes, in the VSTi world there is no reason to maintain this paradigm... you could fit the whole interface on a screen (but it would be crowded and need a lot of screen real-estate. Trust me, you'll get a whole other set of complaints if you go that route! )

The ESQ-1 voice architecture was a big influence on my design for Poly-Ana actually. My old musical partner fron the 80's, -momo-, had just given me his around the time I was designing Poly-Ana's voice. And believe me, it's HARD to fit that many parameters on one screen. And in Poly-Ana's case I actually had it a bit easier than an ESQ-1 voice: Poly-Ana has 3 envelopes instead of 4, and with fewer stages; 2 LFOs instead of 3; and doesn't have to output textual data like the name of the waveforms (though it does have 2 filters where the ESQ-1 had 1). So, I think that this SQ8L VSTi being an EMULATION excuses it from needing a big knob-for-everything interface. If you programmed the original Ensoniq synths, you'll feel at home in this interface in seconds. And if you're not trying to re-live that experience and those sounds, I'm not sure what you'd be using this synth for anyway. And as already mentioned, if you're not a knob twiddler, there's already a wealth of patches out there, in which case you don't need the interface at all.

I wouldn't vote SQ8L for "synth of the year", but "emulation of the year", most definitely!!!

It does need some work on the filter cutoff scaling though. But most of what was good about the ESQ-1's sound was actually what was bad... the crappy digital oscillators. And that sound is there no matter what filter you put after it. It's funny to me that people are amazed that their computers can be made to sound "12 bit" (does your favorite sampler not have a decimation feature?). It's EASY to do that... there is a real "less is more" thing going on with this synth. The technology has grown a lot in the last 20 years. but what made the sound of the old ones distinctive WAS the digital artifacts. Interesting how technically better doesn't always translate to musically better.

Now... all that said... by the end of the 80's both -momo- and I were completely sick of those kinds of sounds. The digital grunge is nice for a while, but then everything starts to sound kind of tainted. Still, I find certain waveforms like the saws are still quite useable -- and for this reason I've mostly programmed string style pads on my (real world) ESQ-1... but I can't imagine ever wanting to use WAVBELL again, except for purely nostalgic fun.