TECHNOSIS PATCH BANKS FROM SOUNDENGINE
 Commercial   RetroSoniq
 Technosis

Technosis Sound Banks

In 1986 (or thereabouts) movie sound designer Mke Peake released a series of add-on sounds that made many reviewers seriously re-examine the power of the ESQ. For many, the synth went from being just a “magic mystery box” that offered tweak-able variations of presets (like the D50) to a deep synthesis engine that rivaled the Oberheim Expander--both in architecture and sound.

Presented here for the first time on the Internet are the original performance notes that came with the groundbreaking Technosis patches.   If you already own the patches, these pages may double their usefulness.  And if you don’t own the patches, what are you waiting for? Jump over to SoundEngine.com and pick them up.  You can have them all for under $30 (for both the ESQ and SQ80), and they even work great in the SQ8L VST.  --And in case you were wondering, this is an unpaid endorsement.

Even if you never plan on buying the patches, these notes are still a good read. They open up the architecture and give you a good idea of what is possible with certain specific tweaks. 

The organization of the different Technosis banks can be confusing to visualize. I have made a patch bank matrix that covers all 7 available banks. Select your desired bank from the menu below:

Click for Psyche ShriekClick for Click for Masterpatch AClick for Masterpatch BClick for Proselect 1A infoClick for Proselect 1B infoClick for Proselect Vol 2Click for Proselect Vol 2Click to read Shared Info

[Psyche Shriek] [Proselect 1A] [Proselect 1B] [Proselect 2] [Masterpatch A] [Masterpatch B] [Shared]
 

These patches are owned and copyrighted © SoundEngine.com. You will not find them for download here or anywhere.  Buy your own copy from SoundEngine for a quite reasonable fee.

Read Mike Peake’s well reasoned argument against intellectual property theft in the “shared data” section if you aren’t convinced you should pay for the commercial sounds you use.

Notes about the notes:

  • These patches were some of the first to come with ‘performance notes’, which Mike called “owners manuals”. In my mind, these are vital for a professional product. 
  • The split/layer table at the bottom of Psyche Shriek (and others) is not just useful, it should be a compulsory for all sound designers.
  • A number of the patches are layered with themselves by default.  Pay attention to the previously mentioned split/layer tables.  If some of the patches always sounded “off” to you, you are probably suffering from a mismatched layer.
  • These patches include some of the earliest attempts I have seen of using harmonic analysis to beef up subtractive synthesis (e.g. the Proselect ‘grand piano’)
  • On the more critical side: Mike, like many in 1986, were over-enamored with the DX7.  He ‘disses’ the brass-making capabilities of the ESQ. But as many of us have found, the architecture is fully as competent at making macho killer brass sounds as the contemporaneous Oberhem’s and Super Jupiter’s. Remember that the early criticism of the Prophet 5 CEM filters was that they were too “brassy” and not as mellow as the SSM variety.  --Guess which other synth series uses the Curtis CEM filters?
  • Look out for spelling errors and such: Scanner “OCR” errors are definitely in these pages. I have tried to edit them by hand, but you may see occasional references to (for example) time parameter T “L”, instead of T-numeral-one (T1), so let logic- and context-be your guide.  If you report errors I will fix them

Watch this space for a deeper a review, a separate list of the patches, audio demos and more for these highly influential original sound banks.

Jump directly to these banks at Soundengine.com!