Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

Emulator X is available in standalone and VST versions.  For the purposes 
of this review, I will be focusing on the standalone version.  Sadly, 
there's no way to resize the onscreen image, and some of the controls are 
sorta small.  At the bottom of the window is a read out of the current CPU 
and Disk activity, the size of the current preset, and the Preset name and 
channel.

The main Emulator X window is divided into two panes, similar to Windows 
Explorer.  The left side serving mainly as a file overview/browser of the 
contents of the sampler "memory", hard drives, and your Emu Sound Library. 
 You can scan your PC to add new Emu sample banks to the Library, so it's 
a nice way to organize things.  This pane also has a view filter, that 
allows you to filter which presets are shown by categories or name. Then 
you just drag and drop your sample of choice on to the Emulator tab at the 
top of the screen.  It's a very intuitive and fast way of working in use, 
though it's not possible to hide this pane once you'e made your choice.

The right side is dedicated to the sampler controls themselves.  You 
switch between the 4 pages that make up the interface by selecting them on 
the right hand pane (main preset overview, voices and zones, links, and 
voice processing).  Again, very easy to use, and intuitive.  The main 
sampler window also has a mini piano for playing the sampler if you don't 
have a midi keyboard connected.  I do wish the keys showed which MIDI 
notes it was receiving though, that's always a handy trouble shooting 
feature, and I would think it would be especially important in a sampler.

The main sampler overview window contains the Preset Patchcords and 4 
modulators, the 16 initial controller amounts with user defineable labels 
(I assume for controllers with scribble strips?), and the master volume 
and tuning controls.

The voices and zones view is where you do all of you keymapping and 
setting up velocity and key crossfades.  You double click on a sample name 
to open the sample editor itself, where you can trim and loop your 
samples.  The voices and zones view reminds me of Kontakt in a way, in 
that you have your multisamples stacked vertically, and you click on a 
small button to expand them and see your samples.  Be nice if you could 
zoom in vertically in this view, as a lot of screen space is wasted if you 
only have a few samples, and the piano shown up top to use as a guide 
while mapping samples is a tad small.

The Links view is where you can link multiple presets into one 
uber-preset.  Anyone familiar with Emu hardware synths and samplers will 
undoubtable know about this feature.  It functions exactly the same and 
merely lets you have other presets play at the same time as the current 
one.

The Voice Processing view is where the real fun begins though.  Here is 
whre all of the synthesis parameters are located.  Again, this is the same 
Emu architecture that has been used in their synths and samplers for 
years, it's just laid out nicely on screen.  You can edit all of the 
Preset voices at once, or just chose individual voices to edit.  You get 2 
LFO's, 1 Filter with 55 types, 36 Patchcords per layer, an amplifier 
section, tuning and transpose (oddly these don't work in real time, but 
only at note on), chorus, and 3 envelopes (Pitch, filter, and aux).  The 
filter section in particular is soooo cool. For those of you familiar with 
Emu's past filters (these are identical), you know that they are complex 
morphing filters, capable of all sorts of weirdness. In the EMu X, you can 
actually see the shape of the filter curve morph as you tweak the cutoff 
and resonance dials (they look like sideways pitchbend knobs).  That's 
nice as it's easy to change them with your mouse by dragging in a straight 
line.  Too bad the rest of the controls require circular mouse movements, 
I wish there was a preference setting to change this to a linear mode, 
it's much easier to control.  Anyway, this section is guaranteed to keep 
you hypnotized for a good while.

This view is where I imagine most people will spend their time, and it's 
laid out very well.  Too bad this couldn't be backward compatible and 
function as an editor for the Proteus 2000 series, as it's exactly what so 
many people have been asking for.  But I digress...

This sampler is very easy to use, on par with HALion if not easier. 
Definitely easy to manage a project in this one, the left hand view is 
always there as an overview and a way to get new sounds fast.  As a sound 
design tool, if you know the EMu hardware Proteus synths, this will be all 
familiar and very welcome, all these parameters are typically hidden 
behind a small 2 bar LCD!  It doesn't have the weirdness that Kontakt has, 
but it's much easier to use IMO, yet still has a lot of mangling options 
now that the Proteus synth parameters are now finally easily accessible. 
The sounds that come with it are varied and sound good to me.  The Studio 
Grand Piano Bank is so so, sounds kinda light to me, not much weight to 
it.  I still prefer Steinberg's THe Grand in that regard, but this is a 
personal preference.  The Emu piano would probably sit in a mix 
unprocessed much easier than The Grand.  The rest of the sounds were 
typical Proteaus quality, which is to say good.

My wishlist is fairly short for this one:

- Linear mouse movement option for the knobs.
- Templates with the Emu X synth parameters already mapped to the same 
CC's that the Command Stations and Proteus synths current transmit by 
default.  This one seems obvious to me, kinda surprised it wasn't 
included, unless I missed something.
- Maybe a bigger version for people with higher screen resolutions?  It's 
a stretch, I admit it.

I'll keep playing with this one, and post as I get more aquainted with it. 
 This is all from only a couple hours spent with the Emu X so far, first 
impressions so to speak.  Didn't even crack the manual, so it's easy to 
use.

Peace and Beats,
rEalm
http://www.soundclick.com/innerportal

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