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Synthesist and sound designer Ian Dixon – in his latest video – shares his take on the classic E-Mu Emax II sampling synthesizer.

The E-MU Systems Emax II is a 16-bit digital sampling workstation, released in 1989, as a more powerful successor to the original 12-bit E-mu Emax. While the Emax II offers improved specs across the board, it dropped the analog filters of the original.

As a result, both versions have unique sonic capabilities and fans among synthesists.

Video Summary:

The E-mu Emax II Rack is a 1990 vintage sampler with 16-bit sampling, digital resonant filters, 16 voices and that classic E-mu sample-library character.

In this video I explain why I bought an Emax II Rack, how it fits into the E-mu Emulator family, and what makes this 2MB version with a Gotek drive interesting today. I look at the history from the original Emulator through to the Emax II, load sounds from the Gotek/sample library, play through factory-style patches, explore the filter and envelope controls, and talk about why vintage samplers still feel different from modern software.

This is partly a first look, partly a vintage sampler demo, and partly the start of a new Emax II journey: building a usable sound library, tagging useful sounds, sampling my own material and finding out what this classic rack sampler can add to modern tracks.

Topics covered:

00:00 Intro and music
00:15 E-mu Emax II Rack overview
00:39 Emax and Emulator history
01:03 Emax II specs and 16-bit sampling
02:06 Front panel and loading sounds
02:37 Gotek drive workflow
03:30 Sampling rates, filters, SCSI and MIDI
04:23 Exploring the sample library
05:08 Loading Grey Sounds Volume 1
06:45 Brass sounds and loading workflow
07:10 Emulator library sounds and synth-style editing
07:55 Digital resonant filter and Q
08:34 Filter envelope experiments
09:50 Synth-style modulation and envelopes
10:14 Sampling, looping and editing options
10:57 Piano, guitar, vocal and classic library sounds
14:26 Building a personal Emax library
15:08 Tagging sounds and using the library tool
15:48 Reflections on vintage digital samplers
16:26 Comments, resources and wrap-up

Watch the video and share your thoughts on the E-Mu Emax II in the comments!

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Elektron may have banned discussion of firmware hacks and mods from its official forum, Elektronauts, but it the unofficial mods seem to be just be coming faster.

Developer Soejrd shared this demo of Sophie for Digitakt, a metallic percussion synth machine with a few modes, all using the regular Digitakt signal path.

Here’s what he has to say about it:

Sophie for Digitakt

Sophie is a metallic percussion synth machine for the original Digitakt (Mk1), OS 1.53.

It began as a fixed-point adaptation of Sophie for Schwung by mestela and evolved into four different models: FUSE, BOOM, PIPE and SHARD. It uses Digitakt’s regular AMP, filter, mixer and effects path.

The source, not a modified Elektron OS, is what this repository distributes.

The source is available in Github.

*Note: This is a ‘build it yourself mod’, where you need to supply your own OS 1.53 file, so that it avoids infringing on Elektron’s copyrights. So if you want to test this out, make sure you backup your work.

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Chase Bliss recently announced that it was ending development of the Chompi sampling keyboard, saying that they were pushing against the limits of what the hardware was capable of.

Since then, Chase Bliss and Chompi Club have released the Chompi’s firmware under an Open Source license, and TemeculaDSP has turned it into a free plugin, Nibbi, that you can run in your DAW as a VST, Audio Unit, or AAX plugin.

Record and sample sounds, play them across the keyboard, layer tape-style loops, and get weird with lo-fi saturation, wow and flutter, delay, reverb, and filters.

While a big part of the appeal of the Chompi is its immediacy and tactile control of sound, the decision to open source its firmware promises to give the design new life.

Nibbi is available now as a free download.

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