This summer SKYLIFE started a poll on the SampleRobot website for users to vote for their favorite synthesizer out of five unusual instruments: A stereo pair of Akai’s AX80s, Ensoniq’s Fizmo, Kawai’s K3, Sequential’s ProphetVS and Yamaha’s TX816. Ten characteristic sounds of the winning instrument should be sampled afterwards.
The quirky digital Fizmo released in 1998 won the competition with 26% of all votes. SKYLIFE sampled around 1.2 gigabytes of audio material from the Fizmo in fine detail.
The sounds one can create with this instrument seem to derive from an alien planet. It’s puzzling which target group Ensoniq had in mind developing this purple oddball. It was a live-or-die experiment for the company, an instrument on the blade.
Even though some may classify the Fizmo as bad gear, it’s not. It’s the only Ensoniq synthesizer featuring a lot of real time controls, partly unusual like the global oscillator detuning knob. Unfortunately, the Fizmo lost the wonderful large VF display of its predecessors. It came a long way, and it was the final chapter for Ensoniq. Apart from the remarkable sound and shaping controls the typographic logo will be remembered in synthesizer history.
Most of the Fizmo sounds from the package were captured with more than one velocity layer to allow dynamic playing when importing the samples.
The package includes the final samples as well as the original SampleRobot projects with the raw wave files so users can export them for their favorite software and hardware instrument.
The package is free to download from the SampleRobot website.
