Ensoniq Mirage

[bayswater]

From listening to these in the archive I think I remember the Fontain patch. It was looped and had filters, ADSR etc, and was one of the few Mirage patches that didn't suck IMO. An airy 10CCish thing.

Thanks for the info on patch structure. Do you recall a patch named Nomad? I'm assuming it was a default and used the Fontain samples.

[dix]

From listening to these in the archive I think I remember the Fontain patch. It was looped and had filters, ADSR etc, and was one of the few Mirage patches that didn't suck IMO. An airy 10CCish thing.

Thanks for the info on patch structure. Do you recall a patch named Nomad? I'm assuming it was a default and used the Fontain samples.

I don't recall. Sry. I have the 3 disks that, I think, came with the Mirage. Those patches just have basic names "Brass Section - Brass Falloff", "Acoustic Bass - Sax" etc. There were lots of additional disks made by Ensoniq and 3rd parties that I couldn't afford. ..."U" and "L" in the filenames of the archived patches indicate the Upper and Lower btw.

[bayswater]

From listening to these in the archive I think I remember the Fontain patch. It was looped and had filters, ADSR etc, and was one of the few Mirage patches that didn't suck IMO. An airy 10CCish thing.

Thanks for the info on patch structure. Do you recall a patch named Nomad? I'm assuming it was a default and used the Fontain samples.

I don't recall. Sry. I have the 3 disks that, I think, came with the Mirage. Those patches just have basic names "Brass Section - Brass Falloff", "Acoustic Bass - Sax" etc. There were lots of additional disks made by Ensoniq and 3rd parties that I couldn't afford. ..."U" and "L" in the filenames of the archived patches indicate the Upper and Lower btw.

OK thanks, thanks for the info. I'll try a bunch of these out on a rainy day.

[mothra]

And ... I don't know if these sample are still under copyright. If you know, please let me know.

Don't know about the Mirage (I had one as well) but I wouldn't worry about the copyright on that. Ensoniq is out of business, so who's gonna sue ya? Besides, while instrument samples may be technically copyright, if you can alter them sufficiently to obfuscate the waveform, there'd be no way to track it. And who is actually policing that?

Ensoniq's name is gone but they were bought by Creative and folded into EMU, which they still own and sell crappy headphones under nowadays hah. Ensoniq and EMU tech went into the Sound Blaster line to die. I doubt Creative cares or would even notice, I dont think they had any clue about that whole side of things. They just wanted the chips..

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I dare them to sue someone using their samples. I double dog dare them!

[bayswater]

I dare them to sue someone using their samples. I double dog dare them!

Let’s hope they don’t triple dog dare us to use them.

[Saintmatthew]

Man, I remember my Mirage. Thing took a beating. I got the EPS 16+ a couple years after it came out too. Wrote albums on that thing.

[funkyfreddy]

Thank you so much for the samples! The first studio I worked at had a Mirage.... Wow!

Now I'm wondering about all the Emulator 2 floppies I still have in storage somewhere

[corbo-billy]

Someone has already taken care of it, in Kontakt format; I do not know if these are the same sounds.

https://www.rhythmicrobot.com/product/sahara

https://puremagnetik.com/products/refraktor

https://www.musicradar.com/reviews/tech ... ana-160356

[bayswater]

Someone has already taken care of it, in Kontakt format; I do not know if these are the same sounds.

https://www.rhythmicrobot.com/product/sahara

Sahara, 7Gb? The samples are only 24Mb.

[ed belknap]

Amazingly, I do still have a Mirage, but haven't booted it up in 10 years or so.

I had to double-check the author of ^^^that post to make sure it wasn't me!

Same deal, my Mirage has been sitting in a closet in my studio for ~7 years since I moved to a new location. And tbh it didn't get a whole lotta use before that, when it was all set up, plugged in, ready to go as part of my whole MIDI rig.

But I can't bring myself to get rid of it...in part because it wouldn't be worth the effort to sell it for the miniscule return I'd get, but also because I fondly remember that wonderful contrast available just by blending the Mirage's 8-bit samples with similar sounds from my more "hi-fi" synths & ROMplers. Especially for brass writing; a nice fat horn stab with some full-fidelity Emu trumpets/trombones/saxes takes on a wonderful character when you double one or two of the inner voices with those gnarly, crunchy Mirage horns.

[Bobbyd]

The Mirage was my first synth. I remember reading the manual and learning a little about samples, parameters, hexidecimal etc. Oh yeah, and it had a built in "sequencer"! I still have a few the floppy disks somewhere.

[James Steele]

I still have my Ensoniq EPS16+ rack mount and a SCSI hard drive it boots from. One day I imagine the SCSI drive will die and I’ll have to load sounds from floppies if I keep it. Great piece and I still can’t find anything that sounds like the “Miami Brass” instrument.