ROM Review - Protean Drums
2003-09-29 by erik_magrini@Baxter.com
Strengths - The acoustic drums samples. The biggest improvement that you can hear right away is in the cymbals. They now sound really smooth and bright and the decay times are SOOO much longer than the previous ROMs. There's all kinds of new drum sounds on the ROM, from acoustic kits to new dance kits, and all of them sound much better. The real drum sounds from actual kits are sweet, some of them have a nice room sound on them that would keep you form having to waste an effect send on some simple drum ambience. Good snares too. Some of the Presets have some cool pseudo stereo tricks being used to make them sound huge or unique, the kinda of thing that would really help the drum tracks to stand out in a XX-7 only composition. Additionally, there's a lot of velocity layered samples too, which make many of the kits a lot more expressive. Good stuff all the way around. This is the first time I've heard drum presets that would make me want to use them as is, instead of making my own like I normally would. Weaknesses - Those into trance and techno styles will like the new kits and instruments too, but if you someone who mainly depends on things like 909 sounds, you could probably get by with just layering the drum sounds in the ROMs you have now. Not saying the new 909-like kits aren't impressive, but that the difference in quality isn't as noticeable as it is the with real instruments (which is huge). Also, some of the individual instrument hits are VERY quiet compared to the XL-7 ROM. Emu has some very nice velocity crossfaded samples now, but if you're just scrolling through the instruments to find an appropriate sound, there's a lot of hits that are just too quiet to cut through anything but the sparsest of mixes. Not a biggy though, you just need to keep scrolling until you find the louder velocity instruments. Additional - - 806 base instrument (samples) - New Instrument categories: "kik:", "gen:", "cym:', and "plr:" - New Preset categories: "zzz:", "lnk:". and "cmb:"(depending on what ROMs you have installed in your machine, these may not all be new for you) The Presets on the Rom are roughly organized thus: Bank 0 - All new Kit's, complete Drum kits. Bank 1 - More Kits, the new ARP Presets, and some key and synth Presets. Bank 2 - All of the individual percussion Presets, some more Kits. Bank 3 - Bass Presets, plenty of Hits and other random Presets, the Link and ZZZ Presets as well. I'm not super familar with the RIFF patterns on the XL-7 ROM, but it does appear that there are quite few new ones in the DRUM Rom. Hitting Audition and scrolling through the Presets is actually a pretty good way to get the best feel for what the new Presets sound like. Especially the KIT Presets, which sound very modern with the new RIFFs triggering them. The Arp Banks 0-2 are seemingly identical to the arps in the XL-7 and the P2500 Roms. HOWEVER, there's also another Bank (3) in the DRUM Rom, and this contains a bunch of new Arps. A lot of these are very similar sounding, and all have a "DA" prefix so I'm guessing they're for a specific purpose. However, I didn't receive and documentation with my ROM (only because it's a pre-release, documentation will be included with all regular orders I would imagine) so I couldn't check this out. Strangely, there are Arps labelled "Empty" in locations 70:3 - 99:3, too bad they couldn't have filled up these last 30 locations. rEalm [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]