Vintage synth recreations usually stop at faithfully modeling the original circuitry. Cherry Audio's new Ensoniq ESQ-1 takes a different approach: it recreates the sound of a 1986 hybrid digital/analog synth while quietly bolting on modern expressive control that the original hardware never had, including full MIDI Polyphonic Expression support.
A Classic Reimagined for Its 40th Anniversary
The original Ensoniq ESQ-1 was a workhorse of 1980s pop, film, and game music, prized for its distinctive digital wavetable-style oscillators paired with an analog-style filter section. Cherry Audio's recreation, released to mark the instrument's 40th anniversary, captures that hybrid character while rebuilding the instrument as a modern plugin. According to Sound On Sound's coverage of the release, the new version preserves the original's rhythmic pattern generator and extensive modulation matrix alongside a substantially expanded preset library.
That preset library is a notable part of the release: alongside the ESQ-1's original factory bank, Cherry Audio brought in sound designers James Terris, James Dyson, Steve Peglar, and Andrew Longhurst to build new patches specifically around the instrument's expanded performance features.
Where MPE Comes In
The headline addition for expressive players is support for both channel aftertouch and polyphonic aftertouch, plus MIDI Polyphonic Expression. In a walkthrough for Cherry Audio, sound designer Andrew Longhurst demonstrated how those modes change the instrument's character in practice — using per-note pressure and MPE data to shape filter movement and modulation independently on each held note, something the 1986 original had no mechanism for at all.
It's a good example of a trend that's become common across the software synth world over the past couple of years: manufacturers retrofitting vintage instrument models with expressive control layers that never existed on the original hardware, rather than treating MPE as a feature exclusive to synths designed from scratch for it. For MPE controller owners, it means instruments like the ESQ-1 — built around a very different sonic philosophy than most modern wavetable or granular synths — become genuinely playable with a Seaboard, Osmose, LinnStrument, or Continuum, rather than just triggerable.
Why It's Worth Paying Attention To
Retrofitting expressive control onto a vintage architecture isn't trivial. The ESQ-1's modulation matrix wasn't designed with continuous per-note data in mind, so routing MPE's pitch bend, pressure, and timbre streams into it in a musically useful way takes real design work rather than just exposing a MIDI Polyphonic Expression toggle. The result, based on early demos, is an instrument that responds to expressive playing in ways that feel native to its filter and oscillator design rather than bolted on as an afterthought.
For players building an MPE-focused instrument collection, the ESQ-1 fills a specific gap: most expressive-first synths lean toward pads, granular textures, or physically modeled tones. A hybrid digital/analog synth with a genuinely distinct 1980s character, now playable with full per-note control, gives sound designers a different sonic starting point than the usual MPE-native suspects.
A Broader Pattern Worth Watching
The ESQ-1 isn't an isolated case. Over the past few release cycles, several developers rebuilding classic hardware in software have quietly started treating expressive control as a baseline feature rather than a novelty add-on, following the same path FM and wavetable emulations took toward polyphonic aftertouch a few years earlier. That's a meaningful shift for anyone who owns an MPE controller but has mostly reached for it with a narrow set of modern, expression-native instruments — it means the practical library of things worth plugging a Seaboard or LinnStrument into keeps growing well beyond the usual suspects, one vintage recreation at a time.
It's also a reminder that expressive control and vintage sound design aren't in tension with each other. The ESQ-1's original appeal was its slightly unpredictable hybrid tone — the kind of character that comes from a specific, dated combination of digital oscillators and analog filtering. Layering MPE on top doesn't sand off that character; based on early demos, it gives players a way to lean into it more deliberately, shaping the same idiosyncratic filter movement in real time rather than only through static modulation routing.
The Cherry Audio Ensoniq ESQ-1 is available now through the Cherry Audio store, with more detail on its modulation options and preset content on Cherry Audio's product page.