E-MU Systems History

Local Santa Cruz community TV show featuring E-MU’s founders

You may think that I am somewhat biased towards the Aussie sampler that started it all, and to a degree, you might be right. However, I have more than a penchant for other sampling pioneers, such as E-MU. In fact, back in the day, I’d say it was pretty much a 50/50 split in terms of my sampling obsession. I think it had something to do with not just the sonic possibilities they offered, but the physical and visual nature of these machines. The CMI was this big, sleek, minimalist slab of off-white wizardry and the Emulator’s were large, angular, grey battleships. Either way, I loved them both and lusted after them more.

So, in lieu of some rather exciting personal news that I will share with you next week, I found this video online whilst doing some research. I had never seen this before and despite its slightly amateurish production (it is low budget community TV after all), this is an hour of sampling and music technology history straight from the horses mouth. Featuring a very humble Dave Rossum, along with co-founder Scott Wedge, it also features E-MU stalwarts Kevin Monohan and Max Mobley. Between them they describe the history, successes and failures of E-MU over a 40 year period, ending with what was ultimately to be the sad demise of the brand after the Creative Labs acquisition.

Much like the Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie NAMM Oral Histories interview, this video provides a valuable insight into the company’s inception, dreams, realities and impact on the music industry. In many ways, you can draw any number of parallels between what Rossum & Wedge set out to do and the endeavours of Vogel & Ryrie. Both had vivid dreams and a vision of making great tools, both possessed little or no actual musical skills, both sold Serial #001 of their products to Stevie Wonder and both lacked the required business acumen to succeed long term! But it is fair to say that the lack of such expertise in enterprise is exactly why they were able to make these amazing machines, free from the shackles of shareholders and bean counters to create game-changing machines and technologies.

Rossum has since returned to his analog roots and started to produce a number of Eurorack modules under the Rossum Electro-Music brand.

So, enjoy this great hour of history, courtesy of Video 4 Archive…