My love for vintage keyboards knows no bounds

Look what I found while searching for the electricity meter in our basement a few months ago:

Who's obsolete?

It’s an Ensoniq EPS-16+ sampling keyboard from the early 1990s. Ok, so 1990 probably isn’t “vintage,” but it was one of the earliest (affordable) samplers capable of recording and playing sounds at 16-bit “CD quality.” For what it’s worth, it was RZA’s sampler of choice on the early Wu-Tang albums.What it was doing the basement, I can only guess. (Was my landlord in a band?) But when I found it sitting on the dirt floor of our basement it was spattered in paint, plaster, and caked with dried mud. You could hear sand sifting through the circuit boards whenever you shook it. It didn’t power up.

For the better part of this past weekend, I was the music-geek version of an Amelie character: tearing the keyboard apart down the circuit boards, cleaning each part individually (scrubbing off all the paint and plaster), and carefully putting the pieces back together.

After cleaning

Then I flipped the power switch.

Hmm…

Did I mention this thing has a floppy disk drive? Turns out you have to load the keyboard’s operating system from a floppy disk before it can boot up, just like an old PC! Luckily, I found a disk image of the OS floppy on a German website (thanks, Google Translator), copied it to my old Windows machine (the only other thing I own that still has a floppy drive), and popped it in the keyboard. The disc spun, beeped, spun again, and ground to a gritty stop. (Turns out I forgot to clean the inside of the disk drive.) A few more minutes with a screwdriver and a handful of cotton swabs later, I was back in action.

Woot!

Whatever you say…

Because it’s a sampler and not a synth, there aren’t preset or built-in sounds; you have to record your own. And because you have to store sounds on a floppy disk, you can only record about 40 seconds at the lowest audio settings and about 11 seconds at “CD-quality.” It’s clearly obsolete. Almost all modern audio recording programs (Pro Tools, Logic, Live, etc.) include software-based sampler plug-ins that can do everything this keyboard does and more. Anybody with a 5 year old laptop can do exponentially more complex sampling than RZA circa 1992. (From a purely technically standpoint, natch.)  So why should anyone care about this relic of music production?

For one: the sounds! Record a drum loop, for instance. (Credit: Floex – “Pinky Pong,” straight from my iPod into the sampler)

Original Loop

Now I’ll pitch it down a 5th.

Loop Down a 5th

Pretty groovy. How about lower still and a little reverb for a DJ Shadow kind of vibe?

Penumbra

I sampled a piano at the lowest quality setting.

Fake Eraser

Listen to those awful, grainy harmonics! How cool is that? Kinda Thom Yorke-y, right? Now I’ll add that piano to the previous loop.

Penumbra Piano

Or with Rhodes…

Penumbra Rhodes

Nothing you can’t do with a software sampler (and a bit-reduction plug-in), but there’s something about doing the whole thing with outdated technology that really appeals to me. And that sound…

But here’s the real reason I love this thing: it slows me down. Waaay down.

It’s so quick and easy to make (relatively) decent-sounding music on the computer that I sometimes find myself clicking through a piece of music I’m working on, making little tweaks and changes faster than the pace I’m actually thinking at.  This serves me well when I’m working on other people’s music; I can get a mix “in the ball park” much quicker, and then spend more time focusing on the more subtle elements that can take a project to the next level.

But when it comes to making my own music, lately I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of all the creative things I could do, that it’s much harder to make a decision and commit to working with it. I sort of miss the days when I knew less about engineering and production, and everything I did was based on sound and intuition. When my friends and I spent hours crowded around a four-track tape recorder in my parents’ basement in high school, we didn’t know what all the knobs and switches did.  All we could do was experiment and listen.

In a similar way, this keyboard lets me play with digital audio without being in front of a computer screen.  I have the benefit of all my engineering and production experience, but squeezed though the various limitations of the instrument.  (E.g. how many different sounds can I create from 11 seconds of sampling time?) Instead of simply stumbling upon interesting sounds by accident (which I often do on the computer), this forces me to think more carefully about the sounds I actually want to make.