Ensoniq ESQ1 synthesiser.
Recently I sold my Korg MS2000 because it was ruining the nice 80s vibe of my studio and also because nearly all the sounds it made were rubbish. So I was glad to see it go but it meant I needed a master keyboard with MIDI, and a vocoder. After a while I found a Roland SVC-350 vocoder and rather than buy a boring controller keyboard, I picked up this ESQ1 for £100 on eBay.
It's a very interesting synth with three digital oscillators per voice and analogue filters, four LFOs and three envelopes. So you can make some very complex sounds with all the envelopes and LFOs, all the modulation routings are quite flexible and the filter is good. If you stick to traditional waves like sawtooth and square then you can make some nice analogue-sounding strings, basses and lead synths, using the other waves which are more "digital" sounding with extra harmonics, and some of which are samples, you can make an awful lot of interesting sounds. Oscillator sync and AM are also available. Lots of classic UK house sounds in here like Adamski, Baby Ford, Sub Sub and so on, and the piano preset is straight off 100 old house records too. You can also get some great John Carpenter drones, weird analogue percussion, industrial noises and digital basses, DX-type bells, Jam & Lewis pads and so on. It's very flexible! There's also an onboard sequencer which is cool and there's even a CV input so you can control aspects of a sound using voltages from modular synths.
At extreme settings sometimes you can hear digital artifacts in the sounds, which can be cool or annoying depending on what you're trying to do, and there are only 32 memories for sounds which is awful, although you can increase this by buying a cartridge. The synth was designed by the same guy who designed the SID chip in the Commodore 64, and the LED screen is cool in an Oberheim Xpander sort of 80s way.
The follow-up was the SQ80 which added more waveforms, a disk-drive so you could have more sounds handy, and aftertouch on the keyboard which is always nice. However they also made the keyboard action really clunky and horrible, whereas the ESQ1 keyboard is pretty nice to play.
EXAMPLE SOUNDS
All these sounds are just single ESQ1 patches with a little reverb except where described otherwise.
ESQ01 - Squarewave bassline with Linn 9000 samples from the K2000.
ESQ02 - ESQ1 percussion sounds in multitimbral mode.
ESQ03 - human voice sound.
ESQ04 - vocal pad.
ESQ05 - jet fighter sound effect.
ESQ06 - nice analogue strings.
ESQ07 - classic Ensoniq bells.
ESQ08 - seagulls at the beach.
ESQ09 - reminds me of a theremin.
ESQ10 - bass sound with velocity controlling filter cutoff, plus Linn 9000 samples from the K2000.
ESQ11 - 80s slap bass sound with Linn 9000 samples from the K2000.
ESQ12 - a big analogue pad.
ESQ13 - analogue toms.
ESQ14 - oscillator sync.
ESQ15 - more rich analogue strings.
ESQ16 - old-sounding synth bells.
ESQ17 - classic Piano 2 preset from a million house oldies, with a Linn 9000 kick drum sample.
ESQ18 - a few different organ patches, no external chorus or speaker simulators were used.
ESQ19 - another big analogue pad.
ESQ20 - wobbly squarewave pad.
ESQ21 - Snaps preset reminds me of old Depeche Mode etc.
ESQ22 - Synth bass over Linn 9000 samples from the K2000.
ESQ23 - analogue lead sound with delay from the MPX1.
ESQ24 - another lead synth sound.
LINKS
A very cool Ensoniq website here
Another very useful ESQ1 site here
More ESQ1 stuff here
Syntaur sell ROM and EEPROM cartridges here
ESQ1 at Vintage Synth Explorer here
ESQ1 at Synth Mania including lots of MP3shere
ESQ1 at Synth Museum here
ESQ1 at Harmony Central here
ESQ1 at Sonic State here