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

2012/5/21 intrepidpete <peteflagg@...>:
> The Perfect Piano in that ZR card is great, but the GM bank is blah. Why do GM banks always sound so bad? I mean the ZR card has nice piano, brass, string, and guitar waveforms, so why not use those for the GM bank so it would sound good?

I think that the strategy for GM/XG banks is (was?) in most cases to
make a bunch of mediocre sound, but in a way they would always sound
good when mixed together in various combinations. It's like with
software - portability usually comes for a price of optimization.

The XG was an interesting case, there was a vivid community built
around it, mostly out of Yamaha MU50/90R and CS1x users. It produced a
heap of interesting tricks & SysEx incantations, trying to squeeze
some more serious sounds out of those boards. I recall a shock when I
brought my P2K home, and started tweaking my existing pieces to use
the E-mu sounds. Of course the XG standard was gone, but the sonic
reward was great...

Bruno