Free Ensoniq ESQ-1 Sample Library Released By Neil Paddock And BPB!

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Free Ensoniq ESQ-1 Sample Library1

Neil Paddock of How To Program Drums has released ESQ-1 Re-Boot, a free collection of Ensoniq ESQ-1 hybrid synthesizer samples. I was lucky enough to join Neil for this great project and so I’ve created an additional set of NKI Patches (for use with Kontakt 5) which you can download for free on BPB.

ESQ-1 Re-Boot features 40 original instrument patches from the legendary Ensoniq ESQ-1 hardware synthesizer, known as one the finest hybrid synthesizers (with analog filters and digital oscillators). The library contains 497 samples in total, sampled across six octaves for each of the included instrument patches.

Neil Paddock has originally released the library as a Refill for Reason 7.1, however an additional version of the library with instrument mappings in SFZ format was released shortly after. You can download both versions of the library for free via Neil Paddock’s website How To Program Drums (linked in the downloads section below). Video instructions for installing the library and loading it in different sampler instruments are available on his website and on his YouTube channel.

For quite a while now, Neil and I have been planning to collaborate on creating free sound libraries, and as a first step in that direction I’ve created a free set of Kontakt 5 patches for the ESQ-1 Re-Boot sample collection. You will need the full version of Kontakt 5 in order to use these patches without any limitations. They will work for 15 minutes in the freeware Kontakt Player. If you don’t own Kontakt, your best bet is to download the free SFZ version of the library from Neil’s website and use it in a free sampler such as Shortcircuit 1, sforzando or Zampler.

A huge THANK YOU goes out to Neil Paddock for creating these samples and releasing them for free, as well as for giving me the opportunity to collaborate with him on such a cool project. It’s been tons of fun for me and I’m incredibly happy with the result. We have more plans for similar projects in the future, so stay tuned!

Video Demo

Check out the ESQ-1 Re-Boot demo video:

Download

ESQ-1 Re-Boot for Kontakt 5 (167 MB download size, RAR archive, contains 40 instrument patches in NKI format, 497 samples in 16-bit WAV format)

ESQ-1 Re-Boot SFZ (external link to Neil Paddock’s website How To Program Drums)

ESQ-1 Re-Boot for Propellerhead Reason (external link to How To Program Drums)

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About Author

Tomislav is a music producer and sound designer from Belgrade, Serbia. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief at Bedroom Producers Blog.

19 Comments

  1. Hey Guys!

    You are most welcome. It’s been great fun putting this together with Tomislav and I hope you have a lot of fun with these ESQ-1 sounds. I am looking forward to hearing some great music made with them too!

    All the best

    Neil

  2. Love the sounds. I wasn’t able to bring in the .nki into Ableton Live, so I went ahead and made a live pack of all 40 presets with Sampler for each sound on each channel.

    • Bedroom Producers Blog

      on

      Hi Teen Power, thanks so much for that! Great work! I’ll add your Live pack to the downloads section above. Cheers!

  3. StudioCompyfox

    on

    Nice free sample pack. However, from the looks of the video, this is a barely scripted Kontakt preset (only an uber-large GUI). So why use Kontakt 5 and not Kontakt 4?

    • Bedroom Producers Blog

      on

      Hi Compy! Well, I can’t make a K4 preset with K5. And yeah the script is pretty basic, but that’s the best I can do at the moment! A simple A/R envelope and HP + LP cutoff.

  4. Are these factory preset ?
    If so, i think ill make a reset on mine …
    ( still have 2 of the synth in the video – Mirage & ESQ-1 )
    if not, can you make sysex dump available ?
    @BPB waiting for Teen Power’s Ableton Pack ;-)
    Thank You all

  5. Joachim Smith

    on

    Thank you very much for this excellent pro bono work! Very much appreciated – with some envelope and HP tweaking there are some very playable sounds in there.

    Kind regards,

    Joachim

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