ANALOG ERA

Chopping Block
Story by the underdog
The late ’70s were a progressive moment in the timeline of music technology. Exploration into the creation of easy-to-use, portable keyboard synthesizers was full tilt. Effect boxes for guitars were becoming commonplace. The development of self–contained drum machines was the logical next step coming out of the Hammond organ, band-in-a-box phenomenon. It seems that some mad scientists took their obsessions with electronic music to the next level and began working on creating portable units capable of capturing or “sampling” the sound of any environment and then manipulating the playback across the keys of a keyboard.

In 1979, Scott Wedge and Dave Rossum, the founders of E-mu, witnessed the debut of the Fairlight CMI, the first commercially produced sampler. With a price tag of $30,000, it was safe to say that the idea of adding one of these to a studio’s arsenal was novelty at best. E-mu set out to produce a machine that would have similar attributes to the Fairlight, but be far more affordable. After some R&D the E-mu Emulator was introduced in 1981, one of its biggest fans, Stevie Wonder was given the first unit off the assembly line, serial #001.

The Emulator was introduced at a cost of $9,000. While still pricey, it wasn’t going to break the bank. The Emulator was capable of loading data from the on board 5-inch floppy drives. It could capture audio through 1/4-inch stereo inputs on the rear, but it was capable of playing back only one sample at a time.

The original Emulator was discontinued in 1983, but E-mu offered three subsequent model upgrades.

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