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ROM Review - Protean Drums

2003-09-29 by erik_magrini@Baxter.com

Strengths - 

The acoustic drums samples.  The biggest improvement that you can hear 
right away is in the cymbals. They now sound really smooth and bright and 
the decay times are SOOO much longer than the previous ROMs. There's all 
kinds of new drum sounds on the ROM, from acoustic kits to new dance kits, 
and all of them sound much better. The real drum sounds from actual kits 
are sweet, some of them have a nice room sound on them that would keep you 
form having to waste an effect send on some simple drum ambience. Good 
snares too.

Some of the Presets have some cool pseudo stereo tricks being used to make 
them sound huge or unique, the kinda of thing that would really help the 
drum tracks to stand out in a XX-7 only composition. Additionally, there's 
a lot of velocity layered samples too, which make many of the kits a lot 
more expressive. Good stuff all the way around. This is the first time 
I've heard drum presets that would make me want to use them as is, instead 
of making my own like I normally would.


Weaknesses - 

Those into trance and techno styles will like the new kits and instruments 
too, but if you someone who mainly depends on things like 909 sounds, you 
could probably get by with just layering the drum sounds in the ROMs you 
have now. Not saying the new 909-like kits aren't impressive, but that the 
difference in quality isn't as noticeable as it is the with real 
instruments (which is huge).

Also, some of the individual instrument hits are VERY quiet compared to 
the XL-7 ROM.  Emu has some very nice velocity crossfaded samples now, but 
if you're just scrolling through the instruments to find an appropriate 
sound, there's a lot of hits that are just too quiet to cut through 
anything but the sparsest of mixes. Not a biggy though, you just need to 
keep scrolling until you find the louder velocity instruments.


Additional -

- 806 base instrument (samples)
- New Instrument categories: "kik:", "gen:", "cym:', and "plr:"
- New Preset categories: "zzz:", "lnk:". and "cmb:"(depending on what ROMs 
you have installed in your machine, these may not all be new for you)

The Presets on the Rom are roughly organized thus:

Bank 0 - All new Kit's, complete Drum kits.
Bank 1 - More Kits, the new ARP Presets, and some key and synth Presets.
Bank 2 - All of the individual percussion Presets, some more Kits.
Bank 3 - Bass Presets, plenty of Hits and other random Presets, the Link 
and ZZZ Presets as well.

I'm not super familar with the RIFF patterns on the XL-7 ROM, but it does 
appear that there are quite few new ones in the DRUM Rom. Hitting 
Audition and scrolling through the Presets is actually a pretty good way 
to get the best feel for what the new Presets sound like. Especially the 
KIT Presets, which sound very modern with the new RIFFs triggering them.

The Arp Banks 0-2 are seemingly identical to the arps in the XL-7 and the 
P2500 Roms. HOWEVER, there's also another Bank (3) in the DRUM Rom, and 
this contains a bunch of new Arps. A lot of these are very similar 
sounding, and all have a "DA" prefix so I'm guessing they're for a 
specific purpose. However, I didn't receive and documentation with my ROM 
(only because it's a pre-release, documentation will be included with all 
regular orders I would imagine) so I couldn't check this out. Strangely, 
there are Arps labelled "Empty" in locations 70:3 - 99:3, too bad they 
couldn't have filled up these last 30 locations.


rEalm


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