E-mu Emulator Sampler User Forum for the EIII EII EI and EIII XP

Greetings everyone,

If you are a fan of the Emulator family, EMAX, and some history of sampling and synths,
we have a local TV show called In The Loop and this months episode is on EMU Systems
and includes interviews with founders Dave Rossum and Scott Wedge as well as early employees
Kevin Monahan and Max Mobley.

Tune in 5/18 or 6/1 at 8:30PM (pacific time) on the internet or local Santa Cruz cable TV for our little EMU documentary. Here is some more details.

On Air Info - both on local cable television and streaming
http://www.communitytv.org/
http://63.249.67.116/cablecast/public/Show.aspx?ChannelID=3&ShowID=13318

Download version to support SCCTV - $5

http://store.payloadz.com/go?id=1014354
or
http://www.video4creative.com/portfolio/television-program-in-the-loop-art-technology.html

Enjoy!

Kevin Monahan

You certainly started a sufficient number of threads to announce this broadcast ;)
Unfortunately 8:30PM in Santa Cruz means the middle of the night in Europe  :(

When buying that video for 5 USD, how and in what format will it be made available to the buyer ?
I don't find any information on the website of Video4Creative, except the BUY NOW button which routes to PayPal...

The format is Quicktime .MOV.  H264 compressed 640/480 29.97FPS.
It is a one hour program.  Sorry if it seems I started to many threads but
it airs tonight and again on June first.  It seemed appropriate to
let each group know about it.   We don't have much control on when
the station chooses to run programs and they will run it again in the future
but no schedule as of yet.

I watched the video last night - it's interesting to see that the founding fathers (and sons  ;) ) are still quite enthousiastic about E-Mu Systems and the important musical (r)evolutions E-Mu Systems were responsible for.
I was slightly hoping for a bit more background videos & information from the past, but the round-table interview with Scott, Dave, Max and you is very interesting - and of course it's meant as a talk show, not a documentary I guess.

At a certain point in the episode, Dave is talking about his first "sampler-in-a-chip" which eventually was released as the E-Chip in the Emax-I.
Of course the later G-chip is much more advanced, but I was still quite surprised about Dave's opinion regarding this E-chip and the Emax.
He mentions things like "it wasn't quite good enough to even call it an Emulator", "it didn't have the sound quality"...
Seems like the E-Mu crew must - even at the time - not have been really happy or convinced by this product themselves ?

BTW: nice to have a former E-Mu employee as a member on this forum !
The other E-Mu guys don't happen to be member too with some nickname ?  ;D

You are correct, it was not a full fledged documentary but an episode of a show my
wife, Denise Gallant, started about a year ago called In The Loop - Art & Technology. The discussion was
shot live by volunteer community TV members and Denise edited in bits and pieces from
material we had or found.  I think that is how I found the Emulator Sampler User Forum. 
We only had an hour to shoot the round-table interview.  We needed another hour at least.
Alas, this is all a labor of love and without funding we are limited in the scope of the project.
We would love to do a real documentary and have a lot of old video that has never seen the light of
day.

The Emulator1, Emulator II and Emax were all 8 Bit instruments but each used a different type
of 8 Bit Compression to attempt to improve signal to noise, etc.. .  They also approached pitch shifting differently.
The Emulator II could be over-saturated, kind of like analog tape, and it sounded good. I don't think that
was by design. It was necessary to develop a chip to reduce parts and costs and the E Chip was the first
attempt.  It had its pluses and minuses and we learned from it and it led to the G Chip which was really an
incredible piece of technology.

I don't know if other former Emu people are on this forum.  I only discovered it myself recently, but I will
forward links to some that I think might be interested.  Thanks for the feeback!  :D

Hi Kevin,

No problem cc the multiple posts. I'll delete the other posts after 6/1 and we'll keep this one for the replies.

David

PS: It's great to have a former EMU employee on this forum. The old Emulators are still being cherished and used for music creation.

I did not see the talk show, I  will try on 6/1, but I remember that reading an old interview with Mr. Dave Rossum was a pure pleasure for me... :

“Q: Your E-mu Systems Modular is considered by many to be the Rolls Royce of analog/digital music equipment...

A: Well, in fact you're wrong... many people say that Rolls Royce is the E-mu of the automotive industry... “


… and I was not too much surprised that his formal training was as a biologist... :


“ …  starting out as a chemist, then changed to physics, and then - about the end of my sophomore year - changed again to biology because it seemed that the neatest people were in biology.”


(The full interview with Mr. Dave Rossum is found here:

http://www.siliconbreakdown.com/rossum_interview.htm )


… and for sure it is great to have a former E-mu employee on this forum... especially if it is  a man, who developed the first ever sampled sound libraries for sampling keyboard and substantially contributed as a sound designer to many classic E-mu sound banks - including the factory sounds for Emulator I, Emulator II, Emulator III, Emax I and II...

He spent with E-mu Systems no less than 20 years...

lubos

Hi Kevin,

I must admit I am thrilled of having you in this forum. I read your name so many times after the last preset of my various E-mu banks as - as far as I understand -the sound designer behind some of my all-time favorite sounds, that I'd like to say a big "thank you" for providing me with such a listening joy and creative tools over the years.

Best regards
Massimo

Hi Massimo,

You are most welcome!  I was at the core of the early sound development for Emu, officially from 1980 through the
early 90s.  For the last 10+ years I have been a partner in our video company Video 4  www.video4creative.com and
have had my hands full dealing with video compression which is reminiscent of the audio challenges we dealt with in the
early days of digital audio.

Thanks for your comments.

Kevin

And finally a recording of the EMU documentary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDS2sDg0eP0

wow that's fantastic.
Will have to watch this when I have a free hour to enjoy it.

Thanks so much ;D

WOHOOOO

Watched it today. Fascinating, informative and pure joy to listen to their history. :)

the story of the world!
thanks ;) ;) ;)

Fantastic, so glad i found this. Thanks for putting this together.

Damn ! Kevin, this is George, Ugly George, working for Francis at Music-Land Paris. I just had dinner with him a few days ago. He didn't change at all. Wowwww...
So nice to hear from you !

You can have my email adress :

dr.c@noos.fr

Cheers !