It is done.
As promised in our last blog posts we sampled 10 patches, around 1.2 gigabytes audio material, from our little purple studio fellow and it turned out to be more complicated than we thought it would be.
First of all the Fizmo reacts to Midi controllers in a very sensitive way. Even if SampleRobot only sent controller reset messages Mr. Fizmo changed the current sound with no way to avoid this with the operating system on the synthesizer. Switching sounds on the instrument was also different to sending Midi program changes. The latter also affected the destination sound. Another thing is the complexity of some of its sounds which are rhythmical but also ever-shifting in texture. We used the autoloop feature of SampleRobot quite a bit in a highly customized way and got good results but still some sounds needed an additional alternative loop search. Furthermore we needed longer recording times than usual to capture all the evolving details even after more than ten seconds in the sound.
It almost seems the Fizmo does not like to be sampled.
We captured most of the Fizmo sounds with more than one velocity layer to allow dynamic playing when you import the samples in your software or hardware sampler.
The following Sounds are included in this download link.
Alpine - Rich pad with fast modulation and some snow glitter
Drumbag - Drum map with dry-wet and reverse control
Electric Beauty - Electric piano combined with an ambient texture
Encounters - Strange modulated Fizmo goodness
Falling Gong - Sound effect that searches for its place in your music
Future Pipes - Sounds like an organ with detuned pipes in clusters
Iceland - Soft crystal pad
Red Pulsar - Rhythmic ambient tone
Rotorscope - Another electric organ with slow and fast Leslie simulation
Solid Motion - Hear the Transwaves in full flavour
Drumbag - Drum map with dry-wet and reverse control
Electric Beauty - Electric piano combined with an ambient texture
Encounters - Strange modulated Fizmo goodness
Falling Gong - Sound effect that searches for its place in your music
Future Pipes - Sounds like an organ with detuned pipes in clusters
Iceland - Soft crystal pad
Red Pulsar - Rhythmic ambient tone
Rotorscope - Another electric organ with slow and fast Leslie simulation
Solid Motion - Hear the Transwaves in full flavour
After you unpack the SampleRobot Fizmo Zip file you will find two new folders. One contains the final SampleRobot exports as wave files which you can use directly in your Daw or samplers. From the file naming you'll see which velocity range you should set it to. The other folder holds all original SampleRobot project files from the Ensoniq Fizmo sampling sessions and the dedicated raw wave files. If you own SampleRobot you can load and directly export the Fizmo samples to the format you need.
You can use all those Fizmo sounds in your music productions with no restrictions. The only disclaimer is to not share the sounds. Copyright 2024 by SKYLIFE.
You will get an idea what this special synthesizer is capable of. Have fun with the samples and hopefully you will have the chance to play a Fizmo in real life.
