E-mu Emulator II: The World Is Your Instrument

August 7, 2026

Manufacturer
E-mu Systems

Released
1984

Type
Digital sampling keyboard

Voices
8-voice polyphony

Technology
8-bit digital sampling with analogue filtering

Known For
Distinctive orchestral and choir libraries, characterful low-resolution sampling and bringing professional sampling into a more immediate keyboard instrument.

The dream was older than digital sampling.

For decades, musicians and engineers had searched for ways to place the sounds of the outside world beneath a musician's fingers. The Mellotron had approached the problem mechanically, storing recordings of strings, choirs and other instruments on individual lengths of magnetic tape. The Fairlight CMI transformed the idea with digital technology, allowing musicians to capture sounds themselves and map those recordings across a keyboard.

But the Fairlight was more than an instrument. It was an expensive computer music system, revolutionary but far beyond the reach of most musicians.

By 1984, E-mu Systems had another answer.

The Emulator II didn't invent sampling. Nor did it make sampling cheap. It made it feel increasingly like an instrument. And once almost any recorded sound could sit behind a key, the definition of an instrument itself began to change.

Origins

E-mu Systems had already spent more than a decade at the intersection of electronic music and computing. Founded in California by Dave Rossum and Scott Wedge, the company initially developed modular synthesizers before becoming an important supplier of digital technology to other manufacturers. By the beginning of the 1980s, digital sampling offered an opportunity to create something of its own.

The original Emulator arrived in 1981. Compared with systems such as the Fairlight CMI, it offered a relatively straightforward proposition: load a sound from floppy disk, place it across a conventional keyboard and play.

The Emulator II, released in 1984, refined that idea considerably. Sampling was still expensive. Memory remained precious. Storage was limited. Digital audio itself was primitive by modern standards. Yet E-mu understood that technical specifications were only part of what made an instrument useful.

Musicians needed sounds. So alongside the machine came something equally important: an expanding library of recordings. Strings. Choirs. Brass. Pianos. Percussion. Voices.

Sounds that previously required musicians, microphones and recording rooms could now be loaded from a floppy disk and played from a keyboard. The sampler wasn't simply becoming an instrument. It was becoming a library of instruments.

Anatomy

The Emulator II looks reassuringly familiar. A five-octave keyboard dominates the instrument. Controls and a display sit above it, while a prominent 5.25-inch floppy disk drive provides access to its sound library. There is little about its appearance to suggest how radical the idea inside it really was.

At its heart was an 8-bit digital sampling system. Clever companding techniques helped extract considerably more useful dynamic range from the available technology, while analogue output circuitry and resonant low-pass filters helped shape the resulting sound. The combination mattered.

An Emulator II does not reproduce a recording transparently. The sample passes through the limitations and character of the machine itself. Lower-resolution digital audio introduces texture. Pitching samples away from their original notes changes their character. Short recordings require looping. Analogue filters soften and colour the result.

The Emulator II orchestra therefore doesn't quite sound like an orchestra. Its choir doesn't quite sound like a choir. Its strings don't quite behave like strings. And musicians came to love precisely that space between the original recording and what returned from the instrument.

What Made It Different

The Fairlight had demonstrated that recorded sound could become playable. The Emulator II helped make the idea practical for a much wider group of professional musicians. That distinction is important.

This wasn't sampling democratised in the modern sense. The Emulator II remained an expensive professional instrument, but compared with the cost and complexity of the earliest computer music systems, the proposition had changed dramatically.

A musician could approach it as a keyboard. Load a disk, choose a sound and play. Sampling was moving away from the computer terminal and towards the familiar territory of a musical instrument.

By 1986, that shift had even become visible in popular culture. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, an Emulator II sits among the expensive technological toys in Ferris's extraordinarily well-equipped bedroom. He uses it not to perform an orchestra or choir, but to trigger coughs and sneezes as part of his attempt to fake an illness.

It's a small joke, but a revealing one. Only a few years earlier, digital sampling had largely belonged to enormously expensive computer music systems in elite studios. Now Hollywood could build a gag around a teenager pressing a key and hearing a recording.

The Emulator II was still far from affordable for the average musician, let alone the average teenager. What had changed was the accessibility of the idea. And the sound itself no longer had to originate inside the instrument. That represented a profound change in the relationship between manufacturer and musician.

Buy a Minimoog and Moog provides the circuitry from which you create a sound. Buy an Emulator II and E-mu can provide both the instrument and the sound. A recorded string section could become part of the product. So could a choir, a brass section, a percussion instrument or almost anything else that could be recorded.

The sample library became part of the personality of the machine. And because musicians were loading many of the same libraries, individual recordings began appearing across otherwise unrelated records. Samples became a shared vocabulary.

A peculiar new form of musical recognition emerged. You might not recognise the instrument. You recognised the sound stored inside it.

In Music

By the middle of the 1980s, the Emulator II was becoming difficult to avoid. Depeche Mode, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Genesis, Jean-Michel Jarre and numerous other artists incorporated the instrument into increasingly sample-based approaches to pop and electronic music.

The Emulator II's Marcato Strings became particularly famous, appearing across records and performances until their slightly exaggerated orchestral attack became almost a musical gesture in its own right. The instrument's choir sounds similarly developed identities independent of the voices originally recorded. The famous libraries became part of the vocabulary of 1980s production.

Pet Shop Boys provide an especially revealing example. Neil Tennant has described the instrumental sounds on West End Girls as coming from an Emulator II, with its distinctive sampled textures helping create a record that sounded simultaneously familiar and unmistakably electronic.

Sampling was producing a strange paradox. The technology promised realism. Musicians increasingly valued character. An orchestra captured digitally and reproduced through an Emulator II didn't necessarily replace an orchestra convincingly. Instead, it became something else: an electronic memory of an orchestra, compressed, looped, filtered and transformed into an instrument with a personality of its own.

The same was true of voices. A recorded choir could be stretched across the keyboard, pitched into ranges no singer had performed and assembled into chords that had never existed in the original recording. Sampling wasn't merely reproducing reality. It was making reality editable.

Design Notes

There is a direct conceptual line between the Mellotron and the Emulator II. Both instruments begin with the same proposition: How do you put an orchestra inside a keyboard?

The Mellotron answered with tape. The Emulator II answered with digital memory. Twenty years separated them, yet both became desirable partly because neither reproduced its source material perfectly.

The Mellotron introduced wobble, mechanical instability and the unmistakable character of magnetic tape. The Emulator II introduced limited resolution, looping, transposition and analogue filtering. In both cases, technological compromise created musical identity.

But the Emulator II introduced another important idea. The instrument could change completely when you changed the disk. A synthesizer contains a method of generating sound. A sampler contains a method of containing other sounds. That distinction meant the Emulator II had no single fixed identity.

Today it could be an orchestra. Tomorrow a choir. Then a collection of drums. Or a sound somebody had recorded themselves. The keyboard remained the same. The instrument behind it could become almost anything.

Legacy

The Emulator II sits at an important point in the history of sampling. The Fairlight CMI had demonstrated the possibilities of digital sampling. The Emulator II helped turn those possibilities into a recognisable musical instrument.

A few years later, the Akai MPC60 would remove the keyboard from the centre of the experience and make sampling increasingly performative, rhythmic and physical. But the Emulator II occupies the space between them.

It helped establish the sample library as part of music-making itself. Its orchestras, choirs, percussion and unusual textures travelled from studio to studio and record to record, creating a shared sonic vocabulary whose descendants surround us today.

Modern musicians think nothing of opening a software instrument and browsing thousands of sampled pianos, orchestras, drums, choirs and found sounds. The library may occupy hundreds of gigabytes rather than a pile of floppy disks. The principle is remarkably familiar.

And perhaps the Emulator II's greatest legacy isn't any individual sample or famous recording. It is the idea that an instrument no longer needs to contain a sound-generating system at all. It can contain the world.