En faite a propos des cartes rom.!

Citation : 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