Talking Synths, Episode 84: The Ensoniq Mirage

Talking Synths is a weekly podcast where Syntaur's crew chats about all manner of synthology. In this episode of Talking Synths, Sam and Carlos take a look at the classic Ensoniq Mirage!
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[@traitortotheliving]

Look forward to the Ensoniq documentary! If you haven’t you should talk to The Daydream Sound he’s been championing Ensoniq’s gear for a very long time.

[@luisfernando4725]

I was just going to recommend the same thing bro! Lol

[@oubrioko]

25:13 The Mirage car horn sample was used for the bass on the title track of Janet Jackson's _Control._ Flyte Tyme mix engineer *Steve Hodge,* indicated that he had to compress the daylights out of it, and crank a ton of EQ to get that bass sound. He tweaked the attack and release on the compressor so that the sound nearly bypasses the compressor - but ultimately gets sucked in, giving the bass that pop. The digital blasts that double Janet's vocal during the refrain of _You Can Be Mine_ on the same album is also the Mirage car horn sample once again. It too is heavily processed according to Hodge, although if you listen carefully - you can kind of tell it's a car horn. The *Jam* & *Lewis* interview in the May 1987 issue of *Keyboard Magazine* includes details on their extensive use of the *Ensoniq Mirage* on *Janet Jackson* tracks _Nasty, Control,_ and _You Can Be Mine,_ and how it was the star instrument of the quintuple-platinum Grammy winning _Control_ album.

[@DarrenJohnMusic]

I bought one of the first Mirages in Vancouver, Canada. I recall it was well over 3 grand Canadian dollars. I also bought an official blank Ensoniq Mirage pre-formatted floppy for 75 Canadian dollars at Long and McQuade before I figured out you could use generic floppies. The Keybed was so spongy and it broke down almost immediately. I eventually ended up exchanging it for the rack mount version. I eventually traded up to an Emax. 30 years later I bought a Mirage on EBay with a massive amount of disks and the filter expander for 150.00. still have it. I also have an EPS 16 plus, a TS-12 and an SQ-80. My Ensoniq shrine. What a great company and a great time in music history.

[@Johnsormani]

Ah the mirage!. Wonderful keyboard. One of my favorite samplers. Ensoniq documentary? very cool , I can't wait

[@pekkagronfors7304]

I have a Korg DSS-1 sampling synthesizer. Funny enough, I have a whole box of diskettes, one of which is called "Ensoniq Mirage sounds" 😁

[@VincentZauhar]

Thanks guys, awesome stuff. Just got a DMS-8 and a GoTek emulator is on the way! Any update on that Ensoniq documentary..?

[@ScottsSynthStuff]

The second synth I ever bought was an Ensoniq Mirage, bought brand new. It cost a fortune to me back then, but it gave me the sounds that up until then you had to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get, with an Emulator or (gasp) Fairlight. It was a total game changer! Programming it in hexadecimal wasn't ideal, but the more powerful MASOS system made this synth a very capable sampler.

[@Doctormix]

Uh you had one?!! I want one now 🤣

[@ScottsSynthStuff]

@@Doctormix Don't even start, Claudio. 😂 😂

[@michaeldean8021]

I got the rack mount in 86 in the UK. Still got some disks in a box somewhere along with some Steinberg Atari ST disks. Had some really good rich sounds out of this baby.

[@lmoore5264]

I bought a new Mirage DSK and an ESQ-1 in 1988. Did sequencing on the esq-1. I bought the Advanced sampling kit that allowed you to midi your Mirage to your Commodore 64 and edit waves on the computer screen. I still have all of it. Recently dug it out of the closet and swapped the disk drive for the USB one. I have Triton disks, Soundprocess disks, Giebler disks and the rack Mirage too. I have the originals disks and lots of others and 2 backups for each disk. But even at that I am finding lots of dead unreadable disks. I hung onto all my Ensoniq stuff, even my SQ80 and VFX-SD. The biggest piece of junk Ensoniq ever turned out was the VFX-SD. It has given me trouble since 1989 and isn't working at all now. Finding schematics and parts is gonna be difficult.

[@Renjeaux]

a day to El Paso and a day to Anaheim? When we were shopping for affordable samplers in the 80's we almost bought the Mirage. But we new a few months later the Sequential Circuits Prophet 2000 came out, and we went that direction.

[@FLH3official]

Good to hear this Mirage!

[@spazimdam]

I remember the Alfred Hitchcock theme music on that Ensoniq demo disk. I thought that was so cool. You're right Sam, Ensoniq had some really cool demos. I bought my ESQ-1 in the early '90s from a music store where I was the service manager. We were an authorized Ensoniq service center. I loved Ensoniq product. Later on I acquired a Mirage that a customer had in the back seat of his car when he ran into the side of a bridge! The Mirage was in pretty bad shape; had broken keys, dents in the metal case, top panel damage. He got a new Mirage DSK-8 and gave me his poor destroyed DSK-1. I restored it and still play it today. The Mirage and the ESQ make a great pair. A lot of times I would store ESQ data via MIDI on Mirage disks and of course load it back into the ESQ from the Mirage. This was very cool since the only way the ESQ could save it's sequences by itself was the tape interface. Very cool video guys, I love that you are keeping Ensoniq alive man.

[@Multi_ToBi]

Entertaining and enlightening at the same time! Thank you Sam and Carlos! You're going to NAMM and then want to do a video about Ensoniq gear...? Fantastic! My ASR and TS and the VFX can't wait to hear about the family...! Greetings from Germany... Still hope to make it to your place...maybe next year... Thomas

[@tpboeh]

I’m heavy on the Ensoniq side with an EPS, an SQ-80, a FIZMO and an MR Rack that I’ve gathered over the years. Definitely unique sounding when played against other synths.

[@horizontalblanking]

Just found this. I was a big Mirage user back in the 80s. The drums you played - 2nd disk - I had as well an they were labeled “NY DRUMS.” They sound a bit like the “Rock Drums” ROMs from Digidesign for the Linn. But I’ve always suspected they were just lifted from The Art of Noise. A great piece of kit and used by so many of us in the early days. Thanks for sharing!

[@Johnsormani]

About sound process and all the other third party products in the day: It was the early days of midi and computers ( atari). There were some really clever people allover the world that got really creative around the early synths and the Atari /Cubase world. Companies like Soundpool( germany) who even made SPDIF audio interfaces for the Atari Falcon, extra outputs or alternative samples on a roland 505 all kinds of stuff really. That sure was a great time!

[@mikemeengs5720]

I had the rack version, and used to save my ESQ-1 sound and sequencer data to the Mirage drive. I had tons of disks with the Mirage samples and ESQ-1 data on them. The whole song on one diskette! Wow!

[@6581punk]

If Jack Tramiel hadn't threatened to sue they guys who left Commodore they might have made a computer. Instead they founded Ensoniq and made great synths. The Emu Emulator (2?) was considered an affordable sampler but the Mirage undercut that by a mile.

[@Syntaur]

I hadn't heard that Tremiel threatened to sue - that's interesting! I'd love to hear more about that, for this documentary we are doing. Would you get in touch directly at [e-mail], if you have any inside scoop on that? Thanks.

[@williamtell1477]

@@Syntaur it’s mentioned in the Ensoniq Wikipedia article but the source is now a bad link. Search for this to find a copy of the original source article: “design case history the Commodore 64” you should find a copy on the internet archive.

[@williamtell1477]

FWIW here is the only mention, at the tail of the article: "Of the original Commodore 64 design team, only Robert Russell remains at Commodore; he is currently a design man¬ ager. The rest of the team-Albert Charpentier, Robert Yannes, and Charles Winterble, along with David Ziembicki and Bruce Crockett, who helped debug the project and bring it into produc¬ tion-left Commodore in the spring of 1983 and formed the com¬ pany Peripheral Visions. Their plan was to design another com¬ puter. To obtain working capital, they took on a contract from Atari-to design a keyboard for the Video Computer System, which was previewed but then, as the video-game market crashed, never released. Peripheral Visions was sued by Commodore, which said the VCS keyboard was a project that belonged to Commodore. At this writing, the suit had not been resolved. Peripheral Visions has been renamed Ensoniq and will soon release its first product, a music synthesizer. Albert Charpentier is currently vice president of engineering at Ensoniq, Bob Yannes is senior designer, and David Ziembicki is manager of production control. Charles Winterble left Peripheral Visions and is now group vice president of electronics at Coleco Industries Inc. of West Hartford, Conn. And Jack Tramiel is currently chief execu¬ tive officer of Atari Corp., the company that was Commodore’s chief competitor in the home-computer market before losing nearly a billion dollars in competing against the C-64."

[@afghanica]

used to rent these from a guitar shop around 1990 in kitchener ontario to make hip-hop. fast forward to the 00's and i got the isf-1 input sampling filter cartridge and it takes the buzzing sound out of the samples which is standard when sampling without it. i believe the stereo dsk-1 came out later (with the red stripe) that didn't have buzz in the samples. it was no doubt that the factory sounds and library instruments for the mirage were made using the isf-1 or equivalent. one of the GREATEST things to do with the mirage is memory wander. if you load up a bank with a bunch of different random samples and do memory wander, the machine turns haunted and vomits its memory in a techno colour rainbow of the wildest glitchiness you could imagine and sounds just wild almost like an alien is controlling it

[@a_nick_t]

Mirage rack and ESQ-1 were the core of my music-making for a long time. As has been mentioned, the Mirage brought those elements you couldn’t get anywhere else at the price. Anything I sampled into it came out sounding huge. Those were the days! 🥲

[@calyx93]

Cool episode - love my Mirage. Oh, and don't forget that in 1984 there was also the PPG Wave + Waveterm system for sampling too. Was priced between the Fairlight and Emulator and lots more flexible.

[@NicholasBryantBonzaiSequoias]

Great keyboard.. Release Velocity, very rare. Even recieves Poly-Aftertouch!

[@temporoboto]

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

[@stixvane]

I have a mirage rack and have been looking forward to upgrading it with a thumb drive os

[@classicarcadeamusementpark4242]

Brings back some memories Sam & Carlos of the Mirage I never had.........or.......did I? You ask......what do you mean....never had, but did? I first got into synths about the time of the Mirage. A Fairlight or Synclavier were just a little out of my budget as a teenager that barely could play. But I found a way. No, my parents didn't run out and buy me the new Mirage. Instead, they bought me the new state of the art music computer. Atari ST you say?.........Not even close! Nope.....the new state of the art Amiga 1000 personal computer. The Amiga was the first personal computer that I've ever heard of that offered software synths. Think.....VST synths, but back in 1985, not 2000something or the end of the 90s. Not only did the Amiga have built in MIDI (all you needed was a $20 din connector adapter) but the Amiga offered sampling like the Mirage. You didn't need to buy a $1700 Mirage. Not only did the Amiga offer sampling, but it could even "emulate" the Mirage. Yeah heard correctly. So I went out and bought 30 Mirage 3.5" floppies and loaded them right into my Amiga's disk drive and played the Mirage samples on the MIDI keyboard of my choice. The Amiga with a few tricks could actually do more like 14 bit sampling, but not directly. Most of the samples were 8 bit similar to the Mirage. Pretty awesome for 1985! We got a state of the art personal computer, state of the art game system as it had the best graphics and sound of any computer or gaming console by a long shot, and it was like getting several MIDI sound modules including a Mirage sampler. I still have my original disk/box for the Mirage emulator software, and one of my Amiga 1000's/MIDI interfaces. I sold my Mirage disks however. Haven't fired it up in decades, but it was pretty amazing for the 80s. I used my Amiga as a sound module in bands too.

[@Abruzzo333]

Proud owner of a Mirage rack, Fizmo and DP2 here. Also owned an SQ-80 for many years. Love Ensoniq.

[@ScottsSynthStuff]

I don't remember what song it was, but I remember hearing a song a number of years ago where you heard the "This is a blank formatted diskette" sample used in the song! I knew right away what that was from.

[@indiegofr]

mylene farmer's 'sans logique' has it featured!!

[@williamtell1477]

Cool I’ve got one of these waiting for me at my uncles place, he picked it up for free from a friend of his from work. I believe it will need some work, hopefully it’s in reasonably repairable shape. I am excited to see what it can do in this video! I was wondering if such an early sampling keyboard would be any good!

[@PracticalCat]

I think the ppg wave term was also an option for a sampler in 84

[@ganormand]

Loved the video-brought back memories. BUT, i have concrete dates of 1983-84, seeing a Mirage in Pascagoula, MS, then going to MMI music in Mobile to purchase. That was followed closely by my purchases of the DSP, ESQ1, SQ80, VFX-SD, then a bunch of TS models for the next 20 years. Bought an MR somewhere along the way too. Found Syntaur early on, and bought sounds and memory expanders, and always looked forward to the delivery of the monthly Transonic Hacker, with contributions by Mr. Mims. I still have a lot of Ensoniq stuff in my music room-but no keyboards. Have a unicorn too: an actual original factory TS12 wire rack music stand that drops into the round holes on back of case. Thank you, Sam.

[@KeytarKris]

A Korg RK 100S2 on the floor right behind the guys! That's Awesome! Keytars are life!

[@kfirtsairi3986]

thank you for this great video i love syntaur' hope youll do a video about the ensoniq vfx with mega piano i had one back in 1989-90 and i had some pblms with calibration error and if you had to reset instrument youll need to put factory disk with sequencer thank you guys

[@909955847736]

1:58 "Quirky" is the perfect word for the first few Ensoniq instruments.

[@drewpaschal9294]

My first synth but I had the rack mount version. Still have it! Would be nice to have a disk emulator with the entire library on it.

[@GlenBerry]

I have a Mirage that has great difficulty booting up, even after I replaced the original disk drive with a modern solid state upgrade. I'm pretty sure there's a loose connection somewhere, because it will EVENTUALLY boot when you least expect it to, but I haven't spent much time earnestly looking for the problem. So, thanks for the tip about reseating the filter chips. I'll give that a try next time I try booting it up.

[@Black_Agent_Seattle]

The ESQ-1 is one of my all time favorite synths, i have two of them =o] I also have an EPS-16+ and a VFXSD, so i definitely love Ensoniq. So i'm looking forward to this documentary.

[@pollinatorhabitatzone]

Whatever happened to the ensoniq documentary? 🥺

[@this_connor_guy]

The first sampler I ever bought back in... wait for it... 2014, lol. It came with a bunch of disks too, which was great. When I make pads with it, I love to sample at the lowest sampling rate, do a 50/50 mix of both oscillators with the same tuning and let that bad boy alias HARD with that grungy lo-fi sound. So tasty! Haha

[@SaccoBelmonte]

All of what I heard reminded me of Art of Noise.

[@TexHex82]

Great presentation of an awesome instrument! I just bought one that looks exactly like yours (with a stripe) but noticed that there is another DSK-8 that looks different (has brackets). Do you know what is the difference?

[@fjfrancois]

Interesting dudes, I have a Emax plus that is inside of a box, it doesn’t work. Did you made a library for the Emu company by any chance? 👍

[@extropy1]

That Memorymoog strings sound is awesome! Is it available in the public domain?

[@polmorgan3533]

I had one of these years ago and i used to really enjoy playing around on it but i just never got the bug for synththisizers really till years later. I wonder what made the difference?

[@unrulysoldier2140]

Fab expose lads. Any suggestions on an eps16 plus keyboard that wont load from floppy ? change to same floppy or go sdcard? Thing is I have 45 original sound floppies. Many thanks.

[@xenochaosxc]

@13:18 Steven Seagal vibes

[@MorbidManoeuvres]

Damn anyone know where I can get this memorymoog disc !? Thanks

[@arthurallsopp9344]

I got 2 Ensoniq Mirages (DSK-8's first and 2nd edition), I have acquired from a friend that used to belong to the great John Kiley Organ player for Boston's Fenway Park (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiley ). Neither are working at the moment. Would Love to get them fixed....

[@Doctormix]

Uhhhh SWEEEEET!

[@rsherid]

❤️

[@adamcrow1060]

I owned one. Bought it for 150 dollars mint from some random rich guy in a gated community. I wish I still had it but it’s possible my ex still has it in her garage.

[@steveanimatrix3887]

Ensoniq was started by a few of the people from Commodore computers, of Commodore 64/Amiga fame. Amigas had built in sampling which was used in a lot of mod trackers back then, a precursor to this keyboard.

[@AudiophileTommy]

Which was first the mirage or the MR 76 ?

[@Syntaur]

The Mirage was Ensoniq's first keyboard, released in 1984. The MR76 was released much later, in 1996. Wow, a lot happened in those 12 years!

[@AudiophileTommy]

@@Syntaur 👍 yes indeed ! Thanks!

[@danielpirone8028]

Time to get mine out of the closet!

[@mickfullfrequency9127]

I sent a email about repairing my ensoniq sq2 and no reply

[@Syntaur]

We do not do outside repairs! Thanks

[@tommymandel]

How would you guys go about cleaning up a Sequential T8 in NYC, including getting red glue off it? Thanks!

[@STRICTURES23]

subscribed to channel.. love how you're real people.. we'll be worth a lot soon enough