Hi-tech to lo-bit. It’s the 80s! Again
No you’re not reading the same story as last issue. The 80s are still here!
As if to remind you it’s our 80s Special issue this month – and to enforce the fact that everything 80s does seem to be everything 2021 – we have yet more new/ old releases in the form of software emulations of classic gear that was released four decades ago (there or there abouts). It’s like we’ve always said, ‘you wait four decades for a decent 80s software instrument emulation and they all arrive just as our 80s issue comes out’. OK we did say that in a particularly weird dream/hallucination but it still counts…
First up, who else but the mighty Roland, producers of so many machines that gave us synth pop and so many others that, intentionally or not, gave us dance music? The Japanese hardware company were once, what you could only call, staunchly ‘anti software’ but have now not only jumped on the bandwagon, but lassoed the horses pulling it, stripped them of any previous instructions and diverted the coach straight out of Dodge to a new town on the prairie called ‘Roland Cloud’. To push the analogy way too far, the new software sheriffs in town now have just about every Roland classic ‘up there’ in software or available to buy separately and ‘a damn fine tin of beans’ they are.
The new additions are the 1985 TR-707 and TR-727 Rhythm Composers. They might not have reached the superstar status of their ‘0’ relations but both (similar) units were used all over early house music. And Roland seem to have gone to extraordinary lengths to recreate their original 25kHz sample rate and 8-bit (sometimes 6-bit) sounds. They “started with the original PCM wave data from the hardware. Next, ACB technology was used to o recreate the interaction n between the PCM engine and analog g output stages, carefully including all its quirks and instabilities”. Could they not have just sampled them?
Anyway, get them as part of your $30 monthly rental or buy them for $150 each.
We reckon UVI will be releasing 80s emulations until 2090, and then they’ll start over, releasing emulations from the 2080s. Their latest, Emulation II+, is, somewhat confusingly, an emulation of an E-mu Emulator, actually three Emulators, plus a “massive lo-fi drum machine Drumulation+”. Yes we’ve types the word ‘emulation’ way too many times but this is basically recreating (thanks thesaurus) three hardware E-mus and a load of classic drum sounds, all based on 80s hardware.
You get Emulation I, a recreation of the original Emulator, “the first affordable 8-bit sampler” with hundreds of sounds, old and new. Emulation II has 319 sounds from the Emulator II and the Oberheim DPX-1. Emulation III goes more high end in terms of quality and variation, and Drumulation+ is really as huge as UVI say with 210 kits and 2400 lo-fi sounds.
As ever with UVI the emphasis is on samples and you get more than 35,000 of them spread over 1300+ presets and 22GB of girth. Of course, as well as the original 8-bit depth, you get modern twists like massive multis and more. Price $199.
Finally Arturia, never ones to see a nostalgia wave and not surf it – we say, writing a news story about the 80s in an
80s Special of Computer Music – are of course joining the 80s party with their own new release. The SQ80 V is a softsynth based on the Ensoniq SQ80 first released in 1987, complete with digital waveforms and analogue filter. Wonder what it sounds like? Well it might just be a little lo-fi as indicated by banks of sounds called Dusty and Raw Machinery. Price TBA.
Which only leaves the questions 1) are there any 80s instruments that haven’t been emulated? And 2) should we do a 70s Special? Answers: yes and no.
uvi.net, rolandcloud.com, arturia.com