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

The xx7 effects sound really thin to me. Perhaps there is something being 
lost in the conversion to mp3, but mine sounds the same way straight out 
of the headphone jack. Everything is crisp and bright and dynamic but 
thin. 

>>>Well, I hope no one has too high of an opinion of the effects 
themselves, I mean they are part of a 'groovebox', and not a dedicated 
rackmount unit.  Personally I think the effects are pretty good sounding, 
I know I was certainly expecting a lot worse.  I agree, they do sound very 
clean and crisp, but lack warmth, which is to be expected from a box that 
is doing sequencing, and synthesis at the same time and costs less than 
$999.  What makes them so flexible I think, is the excellent routing 
system Emu uses, which I know a lot of people don't care for (probably 
because they don't understand it fully).

One thing I wish Emu would add, is some more bizarre effects, or 
combinations, as the current ones are pretty tame, not very exciting in 
dance context at least.  How about a Flange/Phaser + Delay?  Sound 
Chopper?  I think that stuff like that would be better than say all the 
distortion combinations that are included, and seem to be to be largely 
not usable in the context of a mix. <<<

I would be interested to know what you did when mastering the "proper mix" 
as it sounds a bit fuller.

>>>Yeah hopefully the Proper Mix sounds fuller, that was the point! :) The 
original was just recorded straight from the XL into my computer, then 
converted to an MP3 (Lame Encoder, by far the best MP3 encoder, and it's 
free!).  The proper mix had a lot more MIDI work done in Cubase, as I 
initially copied the original arrangement, then proceeded to add a new 
track, and draw in lots of fills and drum rolls and such.  A lot more 
velocity variations (builds and fades) were drawn in too.  Once I was 
happy with the arrangement, I then imported all of the tracks one at a 
time into the computer as 24 bit/44.1kHz audio files (via that handy 
S/PDIF port) and used Wavelab 4.0 to eliminate the small bits of DC Offset 
(like 0.004%) that were present in the files. 

Then I set up a rough mix to get a feel for how everything was gelling 
together.  I added a nice warm EQ (TL Audio's wonderful EQ-1) to the snare 
to warm it up some, and then added some compression (Blue Plug Ins) to the 
BD, and my shaker roll to help tame some stray peaks.  The bassline 
surprisingly didn't get any treatment.  The reversed sound that starts 
about halfway through the song had a touch of distortion added to it via 
Steinberg's Quadrafuzz, and then a little bit of some GRM Tools plug ins 
too.  I'm sure some of the other tracks got some plug in treatment too, I 
just can't think of them right now.  That pulsing sound in the beginning 
intro was made by drawing in 64th note rolls for the BD, and then applying 
a Phaser plug in set with an LFO rate of 1/2 measure.  Made few more 
changes to the track levels in some places, then exported the final mix.

Mastering.  Once I had the mix done, I took a day off to rest my ears and 
regain my objectivity about how the track sounds.  Good thing too, as when 
I previewed the mix the next day the BD was too quiet and the snare was 
too loud.  Went back to Cubase fixed those things and exported the Mix 
again.  Took into Wavelab, and used Freefilter to gently roll off all 
frequecies below 40Hz, and tame some overly bright HH's with a 1/2dB cut 
around 13kHz (more or less, I forget the exact frequency).  Next up in the 
plug in chain was ME Compressor, which is a multiband affair.  I added 
some 3:1 compression in the low frequencies, everything below 200Hz. 
Tightened up the high end too.  Next was the Loudness Maximizer, one of 
the plug ins responsible for the demise of quality, dynamic music ;)  I 
used it to boost the track a tiny bit, maybe increased the Gain by 1.5 dB, 
with a density setting of 1, and a roll off amount of 3.  after that, I 
applied the plug ins to the file, normalized to -0.1 dB, and then used 
Apogee's UV22 plug in to apply dither before converting to a 16bit wav 
file.  Burned it to CD, and that was it! <<<

rEalm