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The second offering from Alesis in the Q series of expansion PCMCIA cards for their 1990s synths.
The EuroDance is surely one of the best in the series, providing excellent, big, well-produced quality sounds for the electronic and dance genres. However, this card offers many other great patches for other types of musical genres- the pads in particular are very spacious and beautiful.
New waveforms include classic House organs and pianos, analog synth waves, additive/bell waveforms, TB-303, Fairlight, ambient, many loops, and some absolutely slamming drum kits, with all usual suspects such as TR-909 and TR-808, but also CR-78, classic Drum ‘n’ Bass drums (Amen breakbeat) and much more. Check out the way it sounds here below.
The Equinox is Generalmusic’s last effort (so far) in the world of pure synthesizers (they do keep producing professional accompaniment keyboards, and to tell the truth, nowadays the difference between the two is blurring more and more).
The Equinox starts pretty much where their previous synthesizer, the incredible-sounding S-series, left off. This machine is absolutely full of features: here’s a concise list of what’s available (from the manual:
• An immense database (16 Mb samples) with over 1000 preset Sounds and user memory locations to store more than 2000 new sounds. 112 Performance memories and a Groove machine featuring over 1000 user-programmable Grooves. • Unique Drawbar mode for instant access to vintage electronic organ sounds using the 8 panel sliders as drawbars with key-click, percussion, overdrive, etc..
• 250.000 event, 16 track sequencer with advanced song editing facilities. • Advanced Sound editing facilities with 64 note polyphony,128 digital filters with resonance, up to 6 oscillators per voice, 3 Lfos and up to 21 independent Envelopes with 10 segment resolution. • Sample Translator to create user-samples and load new samples of the most popular formats (Wav (PC), Aiff (Mac), Akai™, Kurzwail™, Smp, Snd. Future os versions will allow loading of Roland™, Ensoniq™ and Emu™ samples. • Full MIDI implementation – The Equinox is the perfect Master Controller for advanced MIDI set-ups (32 MIDI Channel control, 16 programmable Midi Zones, 8 programmable Sliders, 2 programmable Wheels, 3 assignable Pedals). • Flash-ROM memory which allows the instrument’s memory to be instantly upgraded by simply inserting a special floppy disk in the drive. • The Equinox can be fitted with optional memory (8 Mb backed Sample RAM and up to 32 Mb SIMMs), an internal Hard Disk (2 Gigabytes) and a SCSI port (compatible with CD-ROM, Zip™, Jaz™ external hard drives).
As you see, there’s a lot to this instrument!
What strikes me most about this synth is that it can definitely sound analog (just like its predecessor did). While it’s purely sample-based, there’s something about the way the sounds come across, that make it sound warm, not digital. The quality effects also help a lot in producing some of the best sounds on board.
This is definitely a strong contender to the other workstations that came out at the same time, like the Korg Triton, Yamaha EX5, and Roland original Fantom. For some reasons it wasn’t popular enough, apparently due to the first OS that could have been better. By the time the OS was improved, other workstations had come out and this ended in the forgotten back of the music store – until now! 🙂
Hit a button, and the Equinox becomes a full-fledged Hammond!!! Besides the sliders/drawbars, there are controls for click, percussion and Leslie speed. You can also save your own organ creations, of course. Very realistic 🙂
Drum Kits
Several great-sounding drums on the Equinox. Here are a few examples.
Grooves
A great feature on the Equinox is that you can create and assign full grooves to each single key. Here are a few examples of what is possible to achieve:
Misc. sounds
Arabic
On the Equinox, you can set a the Tuning Scale in different ways: Equal tempered, Inverse, Mean Tone, Werckmeister, Arabian, and you can make your own. For the Kanoun example, I used the Arabian scale to give it a more realistic vibe.
The GM sounds are pretty much the same as all the other GM sets in the world, so I’m not recording examples of this bank.
Initialize the Yamaha DJX
Data Initialization All data can be initialized and restored to the factory preset condition by turning on the power while holding the highest (rightmost) white key on the keyboard. “CLr Backup” will appear briefly on the display.
