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

Hey, I just got one for Christmas!  Does it work?  Yes and no.  Most of 
the time (90%) it's pretty good about finding the tempo correctly and 
tracking it nicely.  However it's not something you can just hit Start on 
and forget about.  Drops in the song can cause it to fluctuate slightly, 
and your midi playback DOES stutter a bit when this happens.  You can put 
it into "free-wheeling" mode however, so it won't try and find the tempo 
during quiet parts and that helps.  It also has Nudge buttons too, which 
you'll need to use occasionally to keep it synced up, as it's quicker than 
letting it catch up automatically sometimes.  Also, sometimes the tempo 
will be right, but the first beat will be off, so you'll need to nudge it 
for that reason too.  It's not hard to do, and once you get the hang of it 
it's pretty easy to use.  Mostly it's reliability comes down to the 
records you spin.  Surprisingly my 4/4 trance records threw it off more 
than any of my breaks tracks, so you'll need to play around a bit to get a 
feel for how it will react to different styles.

How do I use it live?  Well I took off one of the end caps on my XL-7 and 
mounted it to that using the included hardware (took some creative 
bending, but it works fine).  The tricky part is taking the audio feed 
from your DJ mixer and routing it to the Micro Sync.  Technically you're 
not supposed to route the sound modules outputs back into the same mixer 
as the tables, but I found that EXTREMELY impractical for real world DJ 
use (who wants to hook up an extra mixer?  Most clubs wouldn't let you 
anyway).  The issue, is that you don't want the Micro sync to be analyzing 
the signal from the XL-7, as that causes a feedback loop (not an audible 
one, but in terms of calculating tempo).  The Micro Sync will be 
calculating the same tempo it's sending out, so it won't work right.  What 
I did (depends on the mixer) is to use the effects sends to send the audio 
signal to the Micro Sync.  I just leave the effect send on the channel the 
XL-7 is plugged into always off, so that audio never gets routed to the 
micro sync.  BTW the input level for the Micro Sync is extremely finicky, 
it seems to overload very easily (and then stops calculating).  Another 
reason to use effects sends is so you can control the send amount.  On say 
a DJM500 or 600 (what I typically request for live use), this works too, 
but you lose the ability to use the effects at the same time, so you'd 
need to make sure the micro sync is free-wheeling before disengaging the 
effects sends on the mixer.  As with all things electronic I did run into 
some issues....

QUESTIONS/Issues:

1. We all know that the XL-7 doesn't display tempos in increments finer 
than whole numbers, but it looks like it doesn't respond to midi clock 
signals in finer resolutions either.  The tempo display on the micro sync 
will say (for instance) 135.7, and occasionally it will fluctuate a couple 
of tenths now and then.  However the XL-7's tempo display jumps all over 
the place from 132 to 144 the whole time it's synced, is this normal? Does 
the XL-7 respond to finer tuned midi clock signals?

2. Also, sometimes when I switched patterns while the XL-7 was synced with 
the Micro Sync, the XL-7 would use the wrong preset on Channel 1, it would 
default to whatever Preset was assigned to the 1st track in the 1st 
Pattern on power up (ie User 0, bank 0).  Strange, but cycling the power 
on the XL-7 would fix this.

3. One time the XL-7 locked up completely, and had to be powered off to 
work again, bummer live.

Over all I'm happy with it though, even if it is a bit strange 
occasionally.  I spent about 2 hours playing with it the night I got it 
and felt comfortable enough to use it in my set on New Years.  Except for 
the one time it replaced my Bass Drum with a synth stab (see #2 above) it 
went all went ok.  For $159, it's pretty cool piece of gear.

rEalm






I'm sure i'm not the only one who was curious about the micro sync. 
Does it work as well as it claims to? And how have you set it up in 
your setup?