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Emulator II 40th Anniversary · Electronic Music

• Rob Puricelli After celebrating 40 years of the DX7 last year, I got to thinking about what great instruments would be turning 40 in 2024. 1984 was definitely a year within what was a very fertile period for music technology and my thoughts instantly turned to sampling.  And in 1984, one instrument in particular stood out, both sonically and visually. I am, of course, talking about the E-MU Emulator II. With the advent of the Fairlight, digital sampling had taken over popular music with everybody vying to use it, but not always being able to afford it. Dave Rossum, and his team at E-MU saw an opportunity to create a sampler without all the other bits the Fairlight possessed, and try and put it in the hands of more people.  The original Emulator launched in 1981 and sold modestly well, but it was the second iteration that really took off. Building on the exponential advancements and plummeting prices of digital technology, it improved upon its predecessor and soon became ubiquitous, both in the studio and on stage. Bands like Depeche Mode would, for some significant time, use almost nothing but Emulators. So I decided to gather up some people and talk about this iconic instrument and who better than the founder of E-MU, the remarkable Dave Rossum. In addition, I wanted to speak to people who not only developed the Emulator II but used it in anger and so I turned to Kevin Monahan and Paul Wiffen respectively. We gathered our guests in sunny California one Friday morning and I initially asked Dave about the events that led up to the development of the emulator 2 and if the rumours about offering the original concept to Sequential were true. Dave Rossum Uh no, that's not true. The Emulator came about purely as a result of what we saw at the AES show in 1980, in May of 1980. We went down there to demonstrate our Oddity and we actually gave a paper at the AES show and had Marco Alpert and Ed Rudnick simultaneously playing the same polyphonic multi timbral musical instrument called the Oddity. Came back expecting to move that into production to discover that the Sequential royalties were no longer coming along and necessity became the mother of invention. We needed a product quickly and what we'd seen at the AES was the Fairlight Series 1 and a very simple instrument called the Publisson. It was actually a digital delay line but you could hook it up to an analogue one volt per octave keyboard and play two notes simultaneously and really what we saw more than those instruments, because we'd been playing around with digital technology for several years, just prototyping it, in fact I'd even done the design review on Roger Linn's LM-1 drum machine which was also digital, for him. So I was very familiar with the concepts in the circuitry, but what we saw in the AES was the excitement about sampling, that along with the fact that the Fairlight was ridiculously expensive and, you know, in just a day after the AES show and coming back and seeing this letter from Sequential, I came up with this idea for the Emulator 1, which would do those things that everybody was excited about with the Fairlight, but at a tremendously reduced cost. And that was when the Emulator 1 took off and of course that was, got E-mu Systems into sampling and ultimately led to the Emulator 2. RP Can I just quickly ask, it seems like an incredible coincidence or a brilliant piece of planning that the company name is E-mu and the first three letters of the instrument are Emu. Was that a conscious decision or was that a complete stroke of luck? DR It was certainly not a conscious decision as we started the project. It was internally called the sampler and when we got close enough that we knew it was going to be a product, Scott Wedge, the CEO and my founding partner at E-mu, sent everybody home, myself, Marco, Ed Rednick and said, we've got to come up with a name for this. And the next morning Ed came in just smiling, like the cat who’d swallowed the canary and said, I found the name Emulator and of course then it was completely obvious it was the perfect fit, but that's how that happened. RP So Kevin, tell me a little bit about your background before you came to work at E-mu, because I believe you kind of joined the company around the time that the Emulator, or just before, you know, the Emulator itself became a thing. Kevin Monahan Yep, it was probably ’79, I think. I was actually working for my professor from UC Santa Cruz who had a side company called Gentle Electric, made pitch to voltage converters, a pitch follower and custom electronics and he was the, he taught electronic music. I had just left UC Santa Cruz and I was kind of living in his garage and building circuits and building the pitch follower rackmount modules that we made and when that petered out, I ended up working with, or I ended up with a piece of equipment that, called the 360 system slave driver, which I ended up trading to Riley Smith, who I met through a classified ad and he gave me all the parts to build my own Prophet V and I had to stuff one circuit board that was the full voice board that had no parts at all and I had to order those and then I needed these 1% a 100k resistors for the tuning circuit and I went by E-mu to see if I could buy some and Marco Alpert, he invited me upstairs to where they did assembly and said, well we don't have them preselected, you can pick out your own if you'd like and he set me up with an O meter and a box of resistors and I sat there selecting my own and he decided to offer me a job, which, and I was not all that enthusiastic at the time about, you know, modular synthesisers. That's what I thought E-mu was doing at that point, you know, the university had a Moog synthesiser that I had worked with, that I had my own Oberheim two voice and I had to think about it when Marco offered the job and I was unemployed at the point, cause I was actually collecting unemployment from Gentle Electric, so I had time to build that Prophet V at the time so Marco then confided, well, we have this secret project called the sampler and it’s like, I got just incredibly excited at that point, it was in my mind. I'm thinking, oh, digital Mellotron, you know, it's like 128k of Ram. You need more than that, as it turns out, to do a digital Mellotron, but I didn't know that at the time, which was a good thing. You find out early on what you can do and what you can't do with 128k of RAM. But that's where it started for me. RP Paul coming to you, obviously as a user, a demonstrator, a programmer, a player and performer, what was your first experience with an Emulator II and had you had any experience with the original instrument? Paul Wiffen Yeah so I was fortunate enough to be hired by Vangelis to work on the soundtrack of Blade Runner. I went to see him with the French distributor of E-mu, Francis Mondain and he caught me playing around with his CS80, which I'd never had hands-on before and he'd just come from a meeting with Ridley Scott and Ridley Scott said, I don't want any sounds in the soundtrack of this film that anyone's ever heard before. So that was a bit of a poser for Vangelis and he walked in and there I was, I'd made a sound on his CS80, probably more by luck than good judgment and he'd never heard it before and he went, what are you doing for the next three months? So that was how I got in, but over in the corner of the room, I mean, obviously my focus was on the CS80 cause I'd seen it used by so many great players, but over in the corner of the room was this fascinating looking device, the original Emulator and as time went on, the things that I was being asked to do were more and more outside of the domain of a traditional synthesiser and I do remember on one occasion, I should say that Ridley Scott came in and heard what we were doing and got very excited and he actually hired me after Vangelis to work on what we would in England call the Foley or footsteps for the film and so that was when the Emulator really came into its own. I do remember that, I don't know if you are all familiar with the opening of the film, but there's two bursts of flame that come out of these chimneys right in the opening shot and he said, right, I want something new and different from that and I can remember taking a baseball bat that was in Vangelis’ studio and smashing a cardboard box with it and then using the Emulator to shift it down an octave and that's how that sound was done. And that was really my very first experience of sampling, ‘cause I became fascinated by the pitch shifting and how it would change the sound of things but on that soundtrack it was mostly, Vangelis used it for percussion. He had the timpani, I think and the big cymbals and things like that and he would, you know, he'd be playing the CS80 and then he'd lean over and he'd, you know, crash the cymbal or go bom bom bom bom bom with the timpani and that was his main use of it and I can't claim anything for that. So that was how I first became aware of the Emulator. RP So back to you, Dave. I want to know you've got the original Emulator, came out in 1981, been around for around three years, sold around 500 units in total. What drove the update to the Emulator II? Was it demand from users for something new and bigger and better? Was it technology led? Because there wasn't much competition at that specific time in the world of samplers, you either had, as you've mentioned you know, the Fairlight, Sinclaviers, that kind of stuff, but as far as the Emulator was concerned, there wasn't much around to compete with it. What drove you to develop the second iteration? DR A couple of things. I think it was a combination of the advanced user demand, that it was very clear, as Kevin mentioned earlier, 128k of sample memory is very limiting. I mean it's laughably small by today's standard so we certainly knew we wanted more memory and I mean one of the brilliant things about the choosing to go into sampling is that it was the purpose place to ride the tremendous ride of Moore's law, that memory was just crashing in price, that we'd price an instrument and by the time it got into production, we were making good money on it, even though the project plan said that our margin would be razor thin, just because by the time we got around to buying volume memory, it had crashed in price. So we knew we wanted to go somewhere else and traditionally, I mean, even in the modular days, E-mu was very driven by trying to push the state of the art and also because neither Scott nor I were musicians, we attributed a lot of the success of the company, the fact that while other synthesiser designers would design a synthesiser and then go off playing it themselves, we just went on and said, what's the next thing to design and had to listen to the customers because we didn't have ideas ourselves as to how we wanted to make music. So one of the drivers was Jim Cooper. JL Cooper had created a mod called the gen mod for the Emulator One and the Emulator One actually did have voltage controlled filters in it and Jim was smart enough to tap into that and make the filters controllable with an envelope generator, along with the VCAs and that opened our eyes to the possibility of making the Emulator not just a sample playback, but actually a synthesiser as well. And then there were a bunch of technological advances. The Drumulator, which was introduced in between the Emulator One and the Emulator 2, used a technology called a microcontroller, something I had learned back in college at Caltec, which was microprogramming, literally a program of about 32 words that gave instructions to a very small custom-designed computer. We use that technology in the Drumulator and then realised it was applicable with a much bigger instructions cache to the Emulator. So we designed that, which allowed us to do a lot of the forward backward looping things and sort of the stuff that the Emulator II did and just went for a new level of instrument. So that was the driving factor and we had, the Emulator was, Emulator One was my own design, I was the only engineer on that. We had four engineers working on the Emulator II by the time the project wrapped up, so it was a pretty big project. Oh, the other thing we did is improve the fidelity. I saw a circuit, I actually stole it from, oh gosh, that's what happens when you get to be 75 years old, you can't remember names of things, but one of the other companies was using a KM It was a delay line, wasn't it? DR Yeah, it was. KM Not MXR, or…? DR It was MXR. Yeah, MXR had this fairly clever scheme of encoding data for one of their delay lines and I thought that'll work for sampling as well and so I used that and that tremendously improved the fidelity of the Emulator One, or the Emulator II over the Emulator One and putting all those things… KM Both were 8 bit. DR Yeah, yeah, we're still using 8 bit memory. The memory was still the driving factor of the price of the instruments, so the idea of going to 12 or 16 bits was out of the question at that point. But we can get about 12, maybe even 13 or 14 in some cases, bit fidelity out of the 8 bit encoding with this fairly clever scheme and so that created the instrument. So it would, like I said, it was largely technology driven, but the technology was very much inspired by what we were hearing from users. RP Were there any specific challenges that you came up against with the design of the Emulator II that were you know, that caused you some concern as to whether you'd be able to deliver and what you wanted to deliver and did you come up with any workarounds to those kinds of issues? DR Oh wow. One of the problems was power supply, because it was such a big project the, as we built it up, you know and all the project boards were running on the engineering supplies and on the bench in the lab, so when we put it in the instrument the planned power supply just was not up and reliable enough and so I think that was really the last challenge that we had and it ended up being kind of a last minute thing. Fortunately that time switching to power supplies were just beginning to come on the market and they were much more efficient of course. So I think that's what we ended up using in the actual product, but I think that went into the design at the very end. So it was definitely a challenge, but it wasn't a, you know, thinking challenge, it was a where can we get this source. A lot of the stuff really flowed pretty well, that stuff that we'd worked out just plain old worked. Do you remember anything, Kevin that was a challenge engineering wise? KM Well I remember the sequencer, working on that in the hotel room before the Namm show into the wee hours of the night to get the, some certain demos working which, that was, it had quite a bit more sophisticated sequencer than the original Emulator. Well, I just remember that the thing you could do with the Emulator II that set it apart too, was even though it was 8 bit the original Emulator, there was a 8 bit, they all used a certain type of, different type of companding compression expansion, but somehow with the Emulator II, you could overdrive it. You could actually, kind of like tape saturation in a sense and it just had some volume to it and an attack that set it apart. Stevie Wonder was the, what bought the very first Emulator and Steve Porcaro was already an avid Emulator user at that point. He actually was gifted it from Don Henley from when he worked on that first solo album and Ed Simeon was the, his tech back then before he went off to run or start T, or was the U S office for TC Electronics later on. But I remember Ed calling and they, basically you know, it was a big hit with, on that first Don Henley album with Dirty Laundry. It's, you know, the Emulator is all over it with the Kick Him When You're Up, Kick Him When You're Down, you can hear the samples on the keep, you know, coming off the Emulator and he, Don Henley just gave it to Steve at the end, it was Don Henley's Emulator and he gifted it to Steve and but then they would call up and one of the things the Emulator had that was kind of unique is the analogue interface which allowed you to feed it control voltage and gate from other controllers, other, well in this case Steve was using the Roland microcomposer and I remember going down to their studio all the time and he was working on the Michael Jackson Thriller album and he was mocking up things with, he would just be playing these microcontroller or rolling microcomposer sequences and he was feeding it and I remember hearing Human Nature with acoustic guitar from the Emulator. Didn't end up on the, making the cut on the album, but I remember going, that's a nice song. It's like, little did I know. PW That works okay then KM But back to the Emulator II, yeah I mean it was, the amount of memory just, it was like, it felt like having all the real estate in the world compared to the Emulator One and with, yeah, with the filter, you know the, with the real filtering and the DSP I mean, we started getting into some, I think we're still dealing with primitive looping and things of that nature but it was also the, we got with Dana Massey on board and also working with early Digidesign and they were still Digidrums back then. Dana Massey and Evan Brooks started working on Sound Designer, the sample editing program that only worked with the Emulator II initially when it came out and that started to really open things up, it was, you know, it was a nice time when you only, you didn't have any competition. PW Well any competition there was, was so much more expensive. KM Well the Mirage, I don't know, when did the Mirage come out? DR After. KM That was a year later. PW At least a year. DR There were a couple of, one of the first challenges was, there was so much more software in the Emulator II than the Emulator One that we easily very quickly ran out of space in the memory of the Z80 for the software. So we invented this scheme called overlays where we could load a piece of software off of the floppy disk for each of the functions. So I don't remember, but when you punch the buttons on the Emulator, it went out and reloaded these overlays. So it was, there was a software management system that you now had software that wasn't resident and you had to call up the programs, right time. It was a known technology, it was sort of like virtual memory, but we had to reinvent it ourselves and fortunately that went pretty straightforwardly, but I do remember the real technical challenges we had, all of our instruments, starting with a polyphonic keyboard that were computer based, were all using very heavily interrupt driven routines. It's called multi-threaded software now but rather than there being, which I think was true of every other instrument out there, just a main loop that the processor was running, going out and pulling things, everything was interrupt driven in the Emulators and so the processor was doing nothing until you activated it and it was a very sophisticated scheme. But because of these interrupts and this gets a little bit technical, if they interfere with each other you can end up with these bugs that only happen once in a blue moon and so we, with the Emulator there were several of these where you could play with it for half a day or something like that and then all of a sudden this quirky thing would happen and those were just, they were so difficult to find because it could take you three days of testing to figure out if you'd fixed it or not. So that was the real challenge that I think probably was the gating item in the software of the Emulator coming out. KM But the reason you would miss, not notice those overlays loading is because we soon, after the Emulator came out, was starting to ship, we introduced the first hard drive so that sped up those overlays so quick, you know, you kind of, I don't even, I stopped thinking about the, with a floppy drive you notice them but with a hard drive… PW I remember you know, if you were doing something, say with the filter section and then you went, oh I want to change the envelopes, then there would be this slight delay when you went over to that area of the machine and you had to just learn a bit of patience, but as you said the first machines with the hard drive in, they were just a joy to use because, you know, you didn't have the load times for the samples, but you also didn't have the load times for these different software modules, you know, based on where you were working on the front panel. RP I mean, I was going to ask about some of the more technical aspects and you brought up the subject of hard drive. So I've got a question about the evolution of the Emulator II, which we've kind of alluded to already and you know, the E2 came out and it was the standard Emulator II. But then we had the Emulator HD, we had the Emulator + and the Emulator + HD I believe, as well. So there were all these different upgrades and they involved increased memory and hard drives, of course. I mean, how hard was it to implement things like hard drives, which obviously had been around for a while in computing in general, but in terms of musical instruments and even home computers, they were almost unheard of. And here you are putting in, was it a 20 megabyte hard drive in the Emulator II? I mean, was that a difficult thing to shoehorn into an existing system or had you planned for that ahead of time? DR It all goes back to the grey whale. Remember the Gray Whale? I don't know if, yeah you must've seen the Gray Whale. In the early days of E-mu when we were doing modular stuff, we had run across Ed Rudnick, our very much beloved, he passed away tragically in the early two thousands, he was head of manufacturing, head of QA, but people refer to him as the soul of E-mu and when we met him he was the manager of Moyer Music, music store over in San Jose. And Scott and I went in to check out the ARP2600 that Ed personally owned and Ed came over and asked us what we were doing. And I was busy trying to find out how good the 2600 circuits were so that I could know if mine were any good. Turned out they were. But we walked out of the store with Ed's ARP2600 under our arm to go take it apart. We just immediately bonded and Ed became E-mu’s first employee, but we needed him trained to be a technician, that was what we hired him for. So we sent him off to, got him a job at Intel for a year as a technician over there so they could train him under their nickel and then we'd hire him back. And while at Intel Ed pilfered us a 8080 CPU, which was a $300 chip back then and $300 in 1970 was more like $3000 now, and brought it to me and oh wow, a $3000 chip, I'm going to build a computer on it. So I built my own computer and we bought from a surplus store this large rack, 19 inch rack, grey sides, and it was called the Gray Whale. And as time went on we upgraded that computer, but it was E-mu's computer. We wrote our software on it, but we also did all our accounting on it, we typed up our documentation, we had an inventory control system and all this running on our own, originally ADAD and then upgraded to a ZAD computer and that was then, having that computer, that was the, how we got familiar enough with computers to make the polyphonic keyboard and sequencer, the EMU4060. That was the first computer product in electronic music and of course the beginning of the polyphonic keyboard. Dave Smith actually came over and wrote all of the software for the Prophet V on the Gray Whale. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, I was familiar with digital audio and all these techniques by doing experiments where I’d just plug in a board into our Gray Whale and fiddle around with D to A converters and even put on a DSP out of American Microsystems, 12 bit DSP and discovered that 12 bit DSP wasn't good enough for audio. So the hard disk, for example and once again that also was a very heavily interrupt-driven operating system, we were using Zilog's RIO operating system and that was how we learned all about how to write this multi threaded code was through those lessons, so that the Gray Whale was the technology driver and we put a hard disk as soon as hard disk became available, we put a hard disk on the Gray Whale to help with all these tasks that we had it doing, and so it wasn't that hard to step from having built our own one-off computer to add this into the Emulator. So the Gray Whale is the mysterious thing behind so many pieces of technology and unfortunately I don't have a picture of it. I wish I had. KM Well also the drive was a five and a quarter inch form factor, so it easily slipped into the second floppy drive slot on the Emulator and I was going to say I think, didn't Ed also sell Dave Smith his Minimoog at Moyer Music? DR I'm sure he did, yeah, I think that was how Dave Smith got to know about E-mu. RP So you mentioned there the drive bay on the Emulator II and that kind of brings me nicely to the design, you know, the visual industrial design of the Emulator II. It is so iconic, you know you see a silhouette of that, you know exactly what it is and I remember being a teenager in the 1980s and seeing the bands that I loved with Emulator II’s on stage, seeing Midge Ure at live aid with an Emulator to front and center. It was just such an iconic looking thing. Now Dave, when we spoke a few weeks ago you told me that the original Emulator case design was designed by the same company who designed, was it the Apple 2? DR Yes. RP So did they have anything to do with the Emulator II design or did you bring that in-house? What was the thinking behind that very iconic design? Was it driven by, we've got all this stuff, we've got to cram it into a box and this is about the only size box we can do. Or was there some sort of, you know, a more esoteric visual element to it? KM No steel. RP Cause it's all fibreglass isn't it? The outer case is all fibreglass. DR Well it's actually a technology called structural foam. When we did the Drumulator the, to answer your specific question, Hovey-Kelley Designs who did the design for the Emulator One was not involved in any of our subsequent products, not because we were unhappy with them, but just because they were pretty expensive. And so when the Drumulator was being planned, one of Scott's and my high school friends, a fellow named Ken Provost, had gotten a professional job as a mechanical engineer. Matter of fact, I think he actually may have been working at Apple at that time. I know he did eventually work for Apple. And we said, how can we make, you know, the Drumulator was, we were trying to do to Roger Linn’s LM1 what we did to the Fairlight and cut the cost by a large factor and so we needed a very cost effective housing and Ken went out and researched this moulded technology called structural foam, which was much cheaper than injection moulding in terms of the tooling, but quite capable and that got that sort of rounded look that you'll see on the Drumulator. And we were happy enough with that, that I think we brought Ken in the house again. Ken had been, has been an employee at E-mu a number of times as well as a consultant and said let's expand that look to the Emulator II. So I think we took the fundamental similar shape that we had on the E1, added the humpback for the disk drive bay and it was a design that was a collaboration between Ken Provost and Marco Alpert with, I'm sure, some input from Kevin and other folks as well. But that was done all in-house. It was done out of this technology called structural foam. I think the mould for structural foam is actually made out of carved mahogany, very hard wood but it's much easier to work than steel, which you have to use for injection moulding. And that became the technology of choice for a number of housings that E-mu used. RP Because that design, I'm looking at the two I have here in the studio and then just above it I've got an Emax 2 and if you slice away the drive bay on the Emulator II, there's very little difference in terms of the shape and the slope of the angle. You maintained that theme through a number of the keyboards right up until you stopped making keyboards, I guess. Or I think the E4 keyboard was much more, what you might say is a traditional keyboard design, but it was a design that stuck obviously. DR Yeah the challenge was, because it was not a steel case meeting the electromagnetic requirements, the SCC requirements back there, we had to spray metal inside it and that was also another challenge. I don't think it was so much the Emulator II, I think Emulator II may have predated the FCC requirements, but I remember the Emax, we spent hours and hours, days and days in fact, tweaking things so that we could pass the, the requirements. PW Could I ask Dave a question, is that okay? RP Of course, go ahead. PW There was a lot of instruments and indeed the computers around at that time, I had access to a friend's Apple Mac and the big problem with the Apple was that you had to load the system and then it spat out the disc and it, you had to put another disc in for your data or whatever and I think the genius of the E2 was having the double bay so that you weren't constantly swapping operating systems and also didn't you have the operating system on every sound disc so that it, you didn't need to do a swap when it wanted to call up one of those sub modules and you know, was that a conscious decision to make it more usable, say on stage, because disc swapping on stage is just a nightmare. So, you know, who came up with the idea of yeah, we need to put two floppy drives on this, which then of course meant that you could replace one of them with a hard drive and so keep, you know, building a more powerful system. DR Well I don't think I have any answer as to who came up with the idea, because I think we all sort of came up with it simultaneously. The Emulator One had a feature, you could continue playing the Emulator One on one half of the keyboard while you loaded the other half of the keyboard off of the disc. That was the virtue of this multi threaded operating system, is that we could be doing multiple things at once and what we found was that musicians just couldn't keep that straight that nobody used that feature but it became, because the floppies were slow, the load time was important and the disc swapping was important. So we watched people particularly, I think our hero on this was Daryl Dragon, was you know, throwing discs all over the place when he played on stage and so on… KM From captain and to Neil. DR Yes and so I think we all knew that there was an issue and the idea when the five and a quarter half height drives came out, the idea of putting two of those in the space that the E1 had one just immediately fascinated us all. Plus, you know, Kevin has many stories about disc swap parties so being able to copy from one to the other, there were just all of these features. I think the moment we realised they would fit, everybody said yes, that's the right thing to do and then, I think then when hard discs came out and we saw, and they came out in the same form factor, that was a bit of serendipity there because now we can put the hard disc in there and also have the floppy disc so it was portable, that you could move it from one instrument to another. RP How did artists take to the Emulator II when it finally launched and it was getting into their hands. It obviously gave them more flexibility, more power, more sonic clarity than before with the previous Emulator, what was the reception like for this machine in the hands of artists? PW That’s got to be yours mate. DR Go for it Kevin. KM Well I mean, look at the cover of Music Technology with Peter Gabriel and with Depeche Mode, maybe, was that Sound On Sound, I can't remember. PW No, no, that was, they was both on the cover. KM I mean, you had a captive audience of existing Emulator users that easily gravitated to that and it was already beyond, moving really way beyond just, you know, musicians and rock stars. It was the sound effects guys working on television and Advantage Audio, a couple of early guys working in Saturday morning animations, they would get Emmy awards every year. And they, I remember them sending, I've got a couple of Emmy award acknowledgements on my, not in this room, in one of the other rooms, they considered the Emulator such an important tool for their work, they would acknowledge E-mu and myself for all the help we gave them with the Emulator and then, you know, people like Frank Serafini working with motion, big films like Poltergeist and some, well he got a start with Star Trek, but that was before even the Emulator, but yeah he was one of, you know, pioneers with sampling instruments with movie and then the film score guys like Dave Foster with, you know, the sound of the 80s with all of the great ups, you know, Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire and the, I sent you the Doonesbury cartoon, did you get that Rob? RP Yes, yes, saw that, yeah. KM I mean, things were happening without even, I mean, we did no product placement, when you see an Emulator II and Ferris Bueller, we were as surprised as anybody to see things like that or the Doonesbury, was Marco the one that saw that initially, Dave? DR Yeah, yeah. The Doonesbury thing, Marco literally woke up on a Sunday morning, opened the paper and just, his jaw dropped when he saw the Doonesbury cartoon immediately was on that. We all got awoken on Sunday morning by Marcus, go get the newspaper, you have to see this and he wouldn't tell us what it was, he just said go look at Doonesbury, you have to see this, then we, Garry Trudeau right, that's the artists name. He actually sent us the original drawing of it as a gift, but Ferris Bueller, John Hughes called Marco and said will you give me an Emulator? And Marcus said we can't afford to give, we're not that big a company, we can't give $10,000 instruments to people and he just said well, you know, normally we'd charge you a hundred, $200,000 for an opportunity like this, you know and Marcus said yeah, but we just can't afford it, but we will lend you one, you can have it for as long as it takes in the movie and then after the movie came out, John Hughes called up and said I want to keep it, how much can I get it for? So we gave him a really good manufacturer's accommodation price but that one ended up in John Hughes' home. PW Can I just add in a sort of European perspective on what you said about the reaction from artists. So I went off to work with Jeff Downs on the third Asia album and the E2 was all over that album and one particular session they had the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra come in to put, you know, live strings, live everything I think, on a song called Voice of America. And the session went so fast and so well that at the end of it they’d paid for the RPO for the whole day, so Jeff sort of quietly went in and spoke to the conductor and said, yeah, we need to be able to fix anything, we need to just get single notes off each of the sections of the orchestra. So you know, in those days you could get away with this stuff. So he actually had, you know, everyone else went home except for me and Jeff and the engineer in the studio and he actually got them, cheeky sod, to play every, you know, fifth I think over the whole range of each instrument and they just went along with it because they were told that was what was needed and they'd been paid till the end of the day. And then I spent about, I don't know, four months, you know, it was a huge project to create this orchestral library, but that on its own did a huge amount for Jeff. He used to rent out his E2 and he'd send me out as the programmer and when I had all these, you know, RPO strings and clarinets and God knows what, you know, the word started to go around if you want to do orchestral, you know, rent Jeff's Emulator and you'll get Paul Wiffen and the orchestra for free. So, you know, that did a lot in Britain. Of course it didn't always go as smoothly as, I remember Keith Emerson got interested in the Emulator cause he was hearing great things from Jeff and other people and so he rang up Jeff and said, can I rent your Emulator for a day? And he said yeah, you need to hire this guy Paul Wiffen as well you know, cause he knows how to work it. So I drove down there with the Emulator to find that Keith had some really rather unrealistic expectations of what he wanted to do with it. So he, first of all, he had me crawl in his chicken hutch in amongst the chicken poo with a microphone. We recorded the, I think we recorded it to an F1 or something, we weren't, you know, directly recording it into the E2. So you know, I dusted off the chicken poo and went back into the barn that was his studio and, you know, started transferring this stuff in. I really think that Keith thought he'd be able to do a chicken cluck solo or something. And of course, you know, with the stuff going up and down and becoming longer and shorter, it really wasn't going anywhere. So the next thing he said was, okay well I'll get the Kawasaki 1000 motorbike out and so the next thing we were doing was sampling the sound coming off the motorbike because Keith was absolutely obsessed with motorbikes. So I think the next thing he thought was, I'm going to do solos on the Kawasaki and of course the problem was that you couldn't get enough pitch out of it because it was pretty much white noise at all frequencies. So I then started to use the filter to try and narrow it down but by the time you got to something that was pitched enough to be playable, it sounded like a cheap 50cc scooter. So Keith just never took to it. RP I wanted to sort of come back to the way that artists were using these machines back in the day and you had your pioneers of sampling, you know, the likes of Peter Gabriel, David Vorhaus and numerous others that saw it for what it, I well, I think what it really was, was a completely new way of making sounds that had never been heard before, you know, there's that famous South Bank Show footage of Peter Gabriel smashing televisions, and then pitching them down. I think Paul's alluded to, you know, to the interesting sound you can get when you send things two or three octaves down or even two or three octaves up and you create new sounds. And again Depeche mode were famous for using the Emulators for doing such things in creating rhythmic loops from chucking pebbles down drain pipes and that kind of thing. But then as sampling got ever more popular and I guess that's in large part down to the Emulators making it affordable and accessible to many, many more people than say the Fairlight, you then had a breed of musician who were using it for novelty factors and there was lots of chipmunk voices and stuttering going on. And I just wondered from a developer's point of view, did that, how did that affect you? Did you have an opinion on the way that these things were being used? Did you have, you know, were you impressed by everything that was being done or did some things make you go, oh we really didn't invent it to do this. How did the way that artists use these machines impress you or not? KM Well I think there were musicians that were doing sampling on their own, as you mentioned, but I'd say the lion's share of them were looking for instruments already, presets, you know, not everybody can go… PW Soundsets on disc. KM People can't easily go and record their own choir or even try to loop one note of yourself singing is, can be, was very challenging even back then, but we didn't have all the tools still yet that we would soon have. DR The Emulator One, we sold 25 of them right off the bat, five a month was our planned production. So we started shipping I think in July and we sold 10, five in November and went to sell the five for December. We couldn't sell a single one and we literally almost sold the entire rights to the instrument to another company, but when we went out to visit them and looked at them, they hadn't any more of a clue why the thing wasn't selling than we did. But at the January NAMM, the January after this December and we hadn't sold a single instrument, we made three changes. We cut the price of the Emulator One from $10,000 to $8,000, we added the sequencer for free, but we also increased the sound library that we supplied with the instrument from five to 25 discs. And we're all pretty sure that it was that change to 25 disks that broke the dam open because we came back with plenty of orders from NAMM and Emulator One never slowed down until we discontinued it in advance of the Emulator II. Another thing that I want to say about E-mu as a company is that we were a very multicultural, diverse, liberal Company. We, personally I love it when somebody does something with the instrument, any of my instruments that I've ever done. In fact there's an interview somewhere where the interviewer talks about the SP1200, which had its production discontinued for a while and the reason the production was discontinued was because we couldn't get the darn parts for the darn thing and but the interviewer tells one of the hip hop artists, well they discontinued it because they didn't like hip hop. And when I heard this, my jaw just dropped because nothing was further from the truth and if anybody had talked to any Muons, they would know that wasn't the case. So I wondered where this came from and I started asking around the company with the ex Muons, and finally found out that my partner Scott Wedge had said that we discontinued it because we didn't like hip hop as a joke, because it was, anybody would just know that it was completely false, but he just got tired of explaining to people when they said, you know, why did you stop making the SP1200 and going into all these details about the parts we couldn't get and then all the questions, well couldn't you figure out a way around that and so on. And so he's said this thing as a joke and it ended up being quoted as truth instead. PW Dave, did you ever see how Francis Mondain used to demonstrate the Emulator 1, because I think you might have drawn the line there. At the Salon de la Musique, I was representing some other product. He would get on the stage and he'd say all these terrible French swear words into the thing and then he'd make a sort of symphony, you know, a rhythm of all these words and use the different pitches and everything. So, you know, there was some pretty hairy demonstration there and I think part of that reason was that as soon as you give someone a microphone they tend to want to say something dirty, you know, just to see if they can get away with it and Francis was the king of that. KM We got into, I was going to say we got into a lot of trouble with a very little, it was supposed to be a joke in the in one of the ads, I don't know if it was an Emulator or Emulator II, but it was about, you know, backwards mode for creating satanic messages. PW Oh yes! DR But actually we also had the Andrew Thomas Wilson Emulator One demo which is, it was done by an Australian and so it's also very bawdy and has a cacophony of curses in it and things like this. And we wanted to put it on a sound sheet and the sound sheet was manufactured in America South and when we sent them the copy for it, they wrote back and said we can't produce this, it's obscene and Marco got on the phone and we were expecting it to be some craziness but the guy Marco talked to was, very recently just said, you know, we have people on the line, we have to do QA and they are genuinely offended by this. RP I mean, I'm going to hold my hands up. I think when I got my first sampler, which was a small Yamaha keyboard, I've still got it up on the shelf there. The first thing I sampled, I'm sure it was either saying something probably expletive or making a fart sound and I think that's what we all did when we first got our very first ones, I mean we did silly things so I’ll definitely hold my hands up. KM Actually there's one thing I wanted to get back to, it gets, we were drifting too far from it, I'll never get back to it. The, Dave mentioned the three things that affected the Emulator sales like the price and the library but there was also one other thing that was extremely significant that Robby Frank had a lot to do with, putting it to our attention if I remember right. The original Emulator, if you played sounds, they didn't stop when you let go of the keys, they would just keep playing however long they recorded and we would, as a result, we would record some very extremely short percussive sounds because that release could be a problem and I think that had a lot to do with some of the early sales issues until Dave came up with a mod to change to the computer, one of the circuit boards to, I guess maybe the voice board, the main board to control the VCA. I mean pre JL Cooper, just to get a short release. And we had a pedal you could, you know, hold to get the full release but then you could start actually, use, you know, as a keyboard player, now Robbie was a piano player. PW Yeah, it was like the opposite of the Mellotron problem, which was that the tape ran out after 8 seconds, even if you needed more. This would play for 8 seconds, even if you needed less, right? KM Well something like that. PW It's the exact opposite problem that guys found with the Mellotron. KM And Dave flew around the the world to do a mod to those. There was a chance I was going to do that, I don't think, I think that would have been a little risky at the time I was not, I may have got it right a few times, but if if there was a problem that would have been, yeah, a disaster, so… RP I wanna go back, we were talking about sampling bodily functions. Am I right in understanding, because I'm sure our audience won't forgive me if I don't ask this. Obviously Ferris Bueller's Day off is kind of a touchstone for many of us of that era and we, you know, we saw the Emulator II in this kid's bedroom, even though his parents couldn't afford to buy him a new car, they could afford an Emulator II and when Matthew Broderick is triggering all of those samples, am I right in thinking that some of those belong to you, Kevin? KM Well the sneeze and the cough yes, I remember snorting pepper just to get the sneeze. PW See now that's going the extra distance, isn't it? RP That's commitment to the cause, right there. DR I did not know that Kevin, that's very cool. PW So you sent it down pre-loaded with sneezes and coughs and wheezes. KM Well, the other, my contribution and I forget how that whole disc got, cause there's others’ samples on there as well. I just know the cough and the sneeze, I actually had been using that cough in a, as a rhythm track for one of my own pieces of music prior to Ferris Bueller so, but yeah, that's, I, just the sneeze and the cough, that's all I can take credit for. RP Just to kind of draw things to a close, I want to just ask you all really, I guess, in turn. The Emulator III launched in ’87, it was only a short while after the Emulator II which had done fantastically well and now we were in the realms of 16-bit sampling, you know, this wonderful crystal clear, you know, things sounded exactly the same as what they did before they went into the machines and they didn't have that kind of crunchy character and then we saw samplers go very quickly from keyboard instruments to rack modules and, you know, we had, you know, E-mu stopped making keyboard samplers and it was all rackmount modules and competitors like Akai were doing exactly the same. And then of course we had, you know, that kind of rapid transition at the turn of the millennium to software and this is where we find ourselves nowadays. What do you consider and I'll start with Dave first, what do you consider the Emulator II’s legacy is now in 2024, how do you think what you did 40 years ago shaped the way that we approach sampling today. Is it, are there still things that you go, oh yeah, that's how we used to do it or are there things now that just blow your mind in terms of how far the technology has come? DR Well I think we realised, I remember, I don't know where we were but Marco Alpert turned to me and said, you know, we've changed the way the world makes music. There's no question that sampling has become a dominant technology and I think back on those, that day in late December 1980 when we actually sampled our first violin sound, you might've been there Kevin, I know Ed, Marco and Scott were. It was on a Saturday and we had Ken Provost, the guy who I mentioned did our housings, played the violin and we recorded the first violin note and when they did that I was out buying lunch. So I came back and everybody was grinning and they said, I think we've really got something here and that was the start of what now has taken over the music industry. And, you know, I think most of the advances to my mind were quite predictable. As I said we're following Moore's law and Moore's law, it’s maybe slowing down a little bit, but that has been, you know, the huge sample libraries you get, the ability to play a ridiculous number of voices on your computer and so on. The other fun legacy, as you mentioned you know, getting the beautiful fidelity and I know many people love the fact that my company Rossum Electro has now reissued the SP1200 because it has this gritty 12-bit drop sample sound that is so appropriate to certain forms of music. Another thing that's happening is in the Eurorack. Again, I guess I don't mind blowing my own horn, but the Rossum Electro assimilator has now voltage control of all these synthesis parameters, including, you know, the mutate parameter where we actually take and you can voltage control while you're playing back a sound, the fidelity of that sound and make it go back into SP1200 or 8-bit and people made me invent things to actually make it sound worse than any other samplers ever made. So I think that is driving forward the avant guard side of the sampling world where we're now getting out, now that we can do perfect fidelity and a zillion voices, we're now exploring, well, what happens when you limit that? And this is all part of musical creativity, which is what I love about my job so much, is that I get to be at the forefront of inventing these tools that then the musicians can go figure out what to do with and blow my socks off. So that's my outlook. PW And I think Dave if you can't blow your own trumpet, well who can. KM And well you know, in terms of the, like the fidelity you mentioned with the Emulator III and 16-bit, early on, when the Emulator II was out we were starting to record 16-bit with the Sony F1 and I remember one of the first early orchestral sessions we did, we worked with a studio in Burbank called EFX. We did one of the big user sample parties there later on but we, I had a big budget to, at the time I remember driving down in my little sports car with a briefcase full of cash, $20,000, PW Like a drug deal. KM Yeah it was, and I was staying in Hollywood in an incredible kind of condo place that was, it was a really great deal because there was some remodelling going on so I, it was just like unbelievable. We'd go over to the studio and we had scheduled musicians, solo instruments and section instruments and we got a lot of library out of that that we never, I mean, it just kept going for years because with the Emulator II we had to bring it down to eight bit. When the Emulator III came out, we had, we went back from scratch to utilise the 16-bit original source material and then also with the Emulator II you had, we talked about the flop, you know, two floppies and then the hard drive CD ROM, we had Alan Adkins that started Optical Media just over the hill in Los Gatos, came by one time and he introduced CD ROM technology to the industry and starting with the Emulator II, with the RS422 interface. We didn't have SCSI at that point, we were working with the RS422. He had a CD ROM drive with a RS422 interface that, and all of a sudden you had 600 megabytes of sounds. How many, I mean, what is five, half a meg is a, it was a bank of sounds in the Emulator II, so, so all, yeah, that just, you know, that opened up the library. PW I could never afford my own Emulator II. I mean, I was getting good money for these sessions I was doing but I could never afford my own Emulator II. But when Optical Media came out with the CD ROM and they asked me to do a, you know, a CD ROM full of sounds and they asked how much I want, I said I want one of the drives because then I could go to any session, plug in that Optical Media drive and have all my stuff because the biggest problem always with sampling and working in the studio with artists who are keen to get on and do something is, is this going to take long? You know, that's their standard response to a 17 second load time from a floppy. So that was very important for me and, you know, when I got that, that was when the whole thing supercharged for me ‘cause I could run in on a session, I could do a four hour session, give them what they want. I could, I once did three sessions in a day, you know, on film foley because of that. RP Gentlemen, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure and an honour to speak to all three of you. In your own ways you have helped shape the way that we make music and the way that we consume music and I thank you all for that. And I really do want to give a special mention to you, Dave, you know, your work over the last five or six decades now it must be, a long, long time. You have made some amazing achievements and inventions and ideas that have shaped the way that we all do this thing that we do so I just want to say thank you very much indeed for that and I wish you all the best with Rossum Electro and its continued success and to Kevin and Paul, thank-you both for joining us and I know it's been early start for you all… PW Oh I’ve got jetlag anyway KM He’s jetlagged anyway. PW Can I just thank Dave because I’m not sure I ever have because that was probably the best four years of my career that the E2 gave me and yeah I did my part, but I couldn't have done it without that breakthrough at that moment in time, so thank-you. DR You're welcome. This is what I love to do. PW Well, don't stop. DR You know Karen has asked, you know, when I'm going to retire and I say, I love what I do so much I'm going to keep doing it until I drop dead. PW Well, they say, don't they do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life. DR Yep. I'm so blessed. RP And on that note, gentlemen, thank-you very much indeed. It's a great pleasure and thank-you for your time. KM Thank-you. Thanks Rob. PW Bye. DR Thank you Rob, great job. RP Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. Before you go, make sure you visit the Sound On Sound podcast page at soundonsound.com/podcasts, where you can explore all the other great content playing across the other channels. I'm Rob Puricelli, and this has been a Failed Muso production for Sound On Sound.