E-mu Systems Inc. Synthesiser Company

E-mu Systems Inc was founded in 1971 with the goal of building modular synthesisers which was where the synthesiser industry was in the early 1970's.  Incorporation of the company followed in 1972 when patents for their ideas stated to be generated.

E-mu initially concentrated on developing their synthesis methods recording several patterns, some of which were licenced by other well known companies.  Companies like Oberhiem and Sequential were the first to enter into these licencing agreements with those patents being deployed in synthesisers like the Oberheim Four Voice and Prophet-5.  Many other synthesiser manufacturers also licenced the patents for the IC chips that were developed by the company.

The company used the royalties from these licencing agreements to develop their own products with the Emulator (a sampler) and the Drumulator (a sample based drum machine) being launched in 1981 and 1983 respectively. in 1983.  Both the Emulator priced at $7,900 and Drumulator at £995 were very competitively priced compared to the competition and were picked up by many of the leading acts in the market at the point of launch.

I will be honest and say I have never owned any equipment created by this company until the Xboard25.  Principally this was because when new I didn't have the cashflow to buy them and the second hand prices for their instruments in recent years has been at a level that in my mind they do not represent value of money.

I always remember watching the film 'Ferris Beuller's Day Off' released in 1986 and watching the lead character, Ferris, use the E-mu Emulator II to provide the sounds used to make him sound ill when on the phone to his school mates.  At $7,995 that was an expensive instrument in a teenager's bedroom.  I think John Landis might have got this wrong!

I did have a desire to own a SP-12 or SP-1200 sampling drum / loop machines has I had seen these used to great effect by several pop producers.  It was one of the reasons I bought the Isla Instruments S2400.  It was sold on the fact that it emulated the SP-12 and SP-1200 without the second-hand costs of these units.

During the late 1980's E-mu released the Proteus which was a 1U rack mounted synthesiser.  These effectively followed the industry trend of releasing ROMplers.  Three units were produced.  

• The Proteus 1 was loaded with Emulator sound library sounds.  

• The Proteus 2 was loaded with orchestral sounds.

• The Proteus 3 was loaded with world sounds. 

These instruments started the discontinuation of keyboard-based instrument in favour of rack mounted MIDI based instruments for the remainder of the company's existence.

E-mu Systems was acquired by Creative Technology so that Creative could add the E-mu's technology into its line of 'blaster' cards.  Following the acquisition of Ensoniq Creative Technologies combined the E-mu and Ensoniq brands into one operating division.  Even though a number of software products were released post 2000, the manufacturing of hardware-based instruments was discontinued about 2002.   With the E-mu brand being removed from the market during the 2000's.