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

--- In xl7@yahoogroups.com, Matt <somatt@...> wrote:
>
> I make my own patches with square wave as the instrument then expirament
> with filters.

Yes, I'm well on my way making patches too, but it struck me that someone else might have had a similar inclination.

It's funny, the ROM boards for these units are highly sought after and seem to remain at the same price point for years. But it seems few people are actually willing to dive in and program the thing.  At any rate I haven't found any banks of patches for this machine, save for the few in the files section of this group. For some synths there are heaps of patches everywhere.

> Remember in addition to the knobs there are also 3 ADSRs (per
> layer? Someone correct me)

Yep, 3 per layer it is. Quite flexible they are too, which on the other hand means they can be a bit awkward to get your head around. Only the volume envelope is actually dedicated, the filter envelope always needs a patchcord to connect to the filter, so you could use the filter and aux envelopes together with the same destination if you wanted to do something really weird.

Plus the two LFO's. If you set the waveshape to 'random', key sync on, and the lowest frequency you can get a key synced random generator out of the LFO. I've got a patch where the LFO is patched to pan, so each note that appears comes at a slightly different point in the stereo image.

At the moment I'm really using it as a single layer machine with multiple oscillators, i.e. I set up a couple of different waveforms for the different layers, but then use Edit All Layers to get all the envelopes and other controls the same. Well, maybe doing a couple of layer specific tweaks in the end.

It all comes from cutting my teeth on analogue synthesizers, where there is usually two or more oscillators but feeding to a common filter and VCA. My other main axe is a Nord Lead which sounds great and of course is very intuitive with all parameters instantly available. The 16 knobs on the XL-7 don't come far behind though and are infinitely much more useful than the measly 4 knobs that most of the rest of the E-MU range has.

> I get nice TB sounds with the square wav set on monophonic with glide on
> and the arp on 1/16. REMEMBER to play with the filter types!

I haven't really gotten much further than the 24 dB/octave low pass, but it sounds really nice and warm, lacks a bit of bite perhaps.

I think one tends to get carried away with all the features available, instead of trying to simplify matters and only go for the complexity when actually needed.

> Also I figured out that if you assign the note triggers directly to arps on
> your b channels you can hack the sequencer to run arps on latch in addition
> to your 16 tracks, to give you full access to the 32 channels. Then you can
> stop the whole sequencer while your arps keep running, switch patterns, and
> hit play and everything syncs up again.

Cool. I've got to look into this.

One of my tricks has been setting up a user arp which is basically a simple 8 note pattern in octaves, like L-L-H-L-H-H-L-H, then playing the patch like a string pad. It really brightens up a mix without being too 'heavy' like a pad can be.

/Ricard