MarcE published his "The End" patch collection in September 2001, and at the same time he sadly announced it would be his last patch collection for the EX5 as he had sold off all of his synths because he was suffering from a pretty bad illness, which left him with little or no stamina to pursue his love of music, synths and programming.
This really saddened me at a time, and it's always a shock when people who are so selfless are struck down by such things.
After a few days mulling on this, I decided it would be really cool to see if I could organise a tribute of some sort to MarcE as a way of giving back something in return for all that MarcE had given the EX5 community. I was hoping that this might actually help MarcE in some small way.
I knew we had a really kind and friendly community at EX5Tech and of course a lot of people had benefited from all of the Patch Collections that MarcE had freely made available, and I was sure that other people would feel like me and give something back to MarcE.
The basic idea was for people to give MarcE some music back in return. The only stipulation was that such music had to make use of patches from the MarcE Patch Collections, although of course other instruments were allowed as well!
So I set about emailing all of the EX5Tech community (except MarcE of course!) to see if we could make this happen.
I have to say that I was pretty amazed at the response, and the next few months were extremely busy getting it all organised. Torus, who regularly contributes graphics to my endeavours, very kindly made the spash graphic you see on this website, and Fuse, a close friend of MarcE, kindly offered to master the collection and get a CD posted off to MarcE.
It was all a manic rush (not helped by the fact we were still in the Dark Ages of dial up modems in those days, so sending and receiving files took an age!), but we made it and MarcE received a wonderful Christmas present.
Such was the success of the first tribute, that I went on to organise another four of them until we decided, with MarcE's consent, that the idea had run its natural course. Although who knows, maybe it's time for another one?
The number of songs produced over the five years is amazingly 73 songs in total, all freely given by the EX5Tech community!
And now all of the tributes are grouped here on this website for the first time. There's some pretty amazing and diverse music in these tributes that showcase the talent of not only the contributors but the range and versatility of the Yamaha EX5 in general and MarcE's patches in particular.
We hope you enjoy these tribute songs as much as I have.
| MarcE Tribute for 2001 |
| MarcE Tribute for 2002 |
| MarcE Tribute for 2003 |
| MarcE Tribute for 2004 |
| MarcE Tribute for 2005 |