>> A Declaration Of Love (Part 1 ) ENSONIQ Company

mr.personality · Dec 22, 2023

Lois Lane said: ↑

I got my brand new 1976 Gibson Les Paul Deluxe in wine red at their store in the Green Acres Mall (living in Green Acres, Valley Stream was a few minute walk...the parking lot eventually turned into THE place in NY with the most stolen cars anywhere).The store on Queens Blvd was in Rego Park I believe. I bought my first album with my own money in Green Acres, A Journey Through The Past by John Mayall and then my second, The Grateful Dead's Europe '72.
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It''s the one at the confluence of grand central, utopia pkwy, van wyck expwy, forest hills area. Queens courthouse is right there. Rego park's further west. Only store left in Queens it seems. Recall one around Sunnyside but apparently gone.

YawnCarlo · Dec 25, 2023

SomeOtherGuy said: ↑

Here's my crazy story with Ensoniq. My very first sampler was the Ensoniq Mirage in 1985. That thing was a beast, and amazingly everything had to be, and could be, edited from it's simple "88" LED display. I actually got pretty good at it and got some samples on some hit records at the time. But first..

Ensoniq used a proprietary disk floppy disk format to maximize storage, however they sold one disk for several Pounds each. I'm also a hacker, so the first thing I did was reverse engineer their 3.5" floppy format. At the same time an engineer in the USA had also started documenting the memory and IO of the Mirage and published it in a small enthusiast newsletter called the Transoniq Hacker. Armed with that info I hacked my Commodore 64, with a third-party MIDI expansion card plugged in the back, to talk to the Mirage memory bus directly. Once that was working, I wrote a cross-compiler, which allowed me to write Motorola 6809 assembly language, using Commodore's Intel 6502.

First program I wrote was a Mirage floppy formatter utility, and set out formatting floppies. I went down to Denmark Street in London and sold them through Rod Argent's Keyboards shop. They were so popular they often couldn't keep them in stock. I also put ads in Sound on Sound and some other musician magazines and made mad money just from selling these in the store and in the mail. Eventually Ensoniq wisened up and lowered the price of their floppies considerably, so I got out of the floppy business and instead sold my formatting program by mail order, on a floppy, for 20 pounds, giving everyone infinite floppies.

At the same time as I was doing this I also was creating novel sample collection disks. For their time, they were quite ground-breaking sounds, IMHO. I showed them to Rod Argent and he offered to also sell my sample disks in his shop. This store, BTW, was well known to all the top pop artists at that time. Almost every time I went in there I'd recognize somebody.

One day I'd swear I heard one of my samples in a song on the radio. Turned out it actually was! I checked with the keyboard shop and found out lots of big names had been buying my disks. Before long, I'd heard my samples on songs by The Cure, Madness, Go West, Janet Jackson, Mick Jones (B.A.D), and many more artists which I've now totally forgotten over the last (gasp) 40 years.

Oh, I almost forgot.. I also wrote (and sold) a Mirage visual editor for the Commodore 64, which made creating and editing samples 100x easier.

One day I moved away from London and set on a totally different life/career direction not related to music. I often wonder, what if I'd continued working as a sound engineer and sample designer in London. Nevertheless, It's a fun memory, glad I could share it with people who might appreciate it.
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Neat story. Thanks for sharing.

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