4 thoughts on “Sound Design With The Ensoniq TS-12

  1. This is the most in-depth video I’ve seen about this instrument. The TS-series excels in Warp Records-style IDM sounds, and is particularly suited to the more adventurous film-score producer, because of its inventory of unusual waveforms. There are precious few videos that do these keyboards justice.

  2. The TS-12 has a fairly decent microtonal implementation, especially for its time since it supports full keyboard retuning. Because of this, it and its sibling instruments (the TS-10 with a 5 octave rather than 6 octave keyboard, but featuring polyphonic aftertouch) are treasured instruments in many countries throughout the world and still see wide usage.

    It doesn’t support MTS full keyboard tuning, which any acceptable modern instrument should, and it has the strange tuning-per-patch design which is not as useful as a bank of tunings with patches that reference them, but it’s certainly usable and flexible enough that this instrument has enjoyed a life in use greatly surpassing that of many of its contemporaries.

    1. Polyphonic aftertouch on the TS-10! And that vacuum fluorescent display. 😉

      Not a bad synth either from the video. Some nice stuff from the wavetable side plus decent sounding effects and sampling.

    2. It’s not far from MTS though, in its own way, while accomplishing the same effect if I understand it right. According to the manual, you can create as many custom pitch-tables as the memory holds, for live instant recall of the tables at any time using program changes. IE you have pitch-tables saved separately, not WITH the instruments, so as to use any pitch-tables interchangeably with any instruments, live. Or have I got it wrong?

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