From: metlay+@cs.cmu.edu (Mike Metlay) Subject: Mini-review: The Emu Procussion Date: 6 Nov 91 23:26:56 GMT The Emu Procussion is a single-space rackmount device along the same lines as the Proteus, but with percussion samples with an intent to be controlled by a MIDI drum kit or keyboard. I've had one on loan for a few days.... Are all Emu boxes built like this, with a plastic enclosure that's one rack space plus epsilon wide? Phooey! Front panel is minimal, with buttons for MASTER, EDIT, ENTER, and CURSOR, a DATA wheel, and a volume knob. It has six outs, one stereo pair and two Sub pairs that can double as effects send/return pairs. The menuing system is wretched, but usable-- a computer editor would have been nice. OK, so how's it work? The hierarchy is as follows. At the bottom you have the Instrument. An Instrument has a particular Instrument Number to select a sample from the Pro's memory (there are 220 of them, various drums and ethnic instruments as well as synth sounds and sine harmonics of various sorts), tunable up to plus or minus an octave, panned, with a settable Delay amount and Forward or Reverse playback. It has a volume and accent (extra volume) setting, for two levels of dynamics, and a 3-stage ASR envelope that can work in Gate or Trigger mode. Various parts of this Instrument can be modulated by velocity, key number, trigger rate (!), mono pressure, pitch wheel, or a random-value generator, as well as up to four assignable MIDI controllers. OK so far? Now we have a sample whose playback can be delayed, enveloped, and panned. Four of those together form the Layers of a Stack, the basic building block of the Procussion at the user's level. The Stack plays back the four Layers at once or in order, depending on how it's modulated: Layers can be switched by velicities, controllers, etc. There are velocity response curves, pan controls, etc., available, but these are often overridden by global values (more on those in a moment). There is also something called "Procussion Synthesis" which is nothing more than envelope-driven crossfading of samples, and a pseudo-reverb called Spatial Convolution (!) which actually is stored as a sample and used as a Layer of a Stack, but is actually a sort of transform multiplication taken from the Emax II. It's weird, and it sounds like gobbledygook, but it works! Basically, you layer a snare with a "snare space" and the layered sample sounds like the snare has reverb on it! There are over 550 permanent Stacks in memory, ranging from useful to weird, and you can create 512 more of your own. But here's the major glitch in the implementation of the Procussion: you can't choose to use ONLY your own Stacks, without crippling the machine! Here's the next level up: the Zone and the Kit. Each Stack is assigned to a Zone, which has a MIDI note range, switchable for following pitch or not if there's more than one note in the range, Coarse and fine tuning, volume, pan and output assignments, a choice of whether polyphony is unlimited, limited, or has special features like chokes for cymbals or hi-hat closure, and a couple of global modulation sources. You put together up to 24 Zones to make a Kit, which covers the keyboard range. But the problem is, only 8 of the 24 can have User Stacks in them, the rest must be Factory Stacks! I consider this a bit annoying, and it will probably get owrse as one gets more and more used to tweaking Stacks to one's needs. There are 128 Kits, 64 preset and 64 rewritable, and they have global MIDI interpretation commands, including footswitch and footpedal control options for kick drums, hihats, etc. The DrumKat and Pocket Pedal are suggested as suitable controllers, as are the Octapads, Impulse, and so on. The unit also has a gee-whiz Demo Sequence built in. Interesting, once. The manual is clear, well written and illustrated profusely with a decent index. Extra points on this one. And the sound? Well, I'm not the best judge, being a guy who's had nothing in his studio but a TR-707 for drum noises for a LONG time, but I would easily recommend this unit to anyone who wanted a drop-in sound device with a fair amount of flexibility, for whom the Alesis D4 wasn't enough and a sampler was too much. The Stacks are interesting, dynamically expressive, and a lot of fun, with SFX noises and a number of good tuned sounds like marimbas and basses. But the unit's a pain to program, and getting weird results takes some doing-- as Nick would say, there's not a lot of distance between the samples and your sounds. As a drum synthesizer, it falls a bit short of, say, the XD-5. But it sounds a LOT better in terms of sample quality, in my opinion. I don't know if I'd spend the 700-plus bucks on one; I'm not that enamored of 1990s drum noises YET. But I would easily recommend it to anyone who wanted a compromise between presets and total controllability like a sampler's at a reasonable price. Let your ears be the judge, and work with it IN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR RIG for a while before deciding. Metlay sez check it out. -- metlay | Synthesizers exist, despite sampling fads, the leader of the gang, er, Team| to create sounds that don't exist on Earth. | After all, elephants can be photographed, metlay@organ.music.cs.cmu.edu | but a dragon can only be painted....