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

I played it for about 20 minutes (felt a little guilty, since I 
already have one in the mail).

The grooves that comes with are >really< busy, and the ones I found 
were pretty much all straight 'trance/euro techno' styles. If this 
had been my first impression of the unit, I would have been seriously 
turned off :> But since I'm migrating from the p2k and used to have 
the xlead rom, I know what the sound engine and ROM is capable of, so 
I was stoked to hear so much going on at once, and hear the amount of 
flexibility and life could get from the track system.

The unit is moderately intuitive, despite the plethora of knobs and 
actions available at any one time. I'm sure that most actions will 
become unconcious quickly - the sign of a good ui. With the realtime 
controllers, you need to know which knobs do what to which sounds, or 
you won't get what you expect, just like the p2k/xl-1.

My biggest peeve, and it was either something to do with the way the 
unit was set up, or a >serious< bug - when switching between grooves, 
the unit LCD would flash and the beat would be lost momentarily - it 
was not seamless at all. The MP-7 sitting next to it didn't display 
this - it switched smoothly. If that shows up in the unit I get on 
monday, I'm going to be pretty concerned. However, I think this would 
be unlikely, since the unit is pretty much set up for seamless 
transitions - it waits till the end of the groove to switch over. 

It's going to take a lot of work to get the most out of this beast - 
since you can have an entire 64 midi channel groove on each of the 
sixteen tracks, it's really easy to get over-noisy, if you aren't 
100% sure what you are turning on at any one time. One thing I found 
myself wishing for was a latchable track system - where turning on 
one track turned off another. Emu?

My 20 minutes, 

sserendipity


--- In xl7@y..., "Mark McQuay" <mmcquay@m...> wrote:
>  
> I just came back from the local music store, where they have just 
set 
> them up.
> 
> Well...................and then? ( from Dude Where's My Car?)