rEalm's DRUM Rom Review
2003-07-14 by erik_magrini@Baxter.com
Thought some people might like a review of the new Emu Drum ROM, so here goes: The installation is obviously the same as all of the other ROMs, remove the 8 screws on the bottom, pop in the ROM, replace the screws. Turned on the XL-7 and entered Preset Mode to see what the new ROM shows up as in ROM ID field. Unsurprisingly it's called "DRUM", go figure. A quick scroll through the Preset Edit menu shows that the new ROM has: - 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. Ok, enough of the boring stuff, how does it sound, you ask? Brilliant. 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, both the real ones and the synthetic ones (will fit in nicely in my breaks tunes). 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. So, is it worth it? I think so, especially if your music is heavily dependant on drums for it's main instruments. Jungle, breaks, rock, and hip-hop would benefit the most, especially if you like to use realistic samples in your music. 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). Anyway, definitely a ROM I'm glad I have, although actually it's made my life more difficult. Now I have to go back and replace all the drum sounds in my old songs :) - rEalm [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]