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#13814 - 06/14/00 09:24 AM EMU Ultra series
digiboy Offline
Member

Registered: 05/12/00
Posts: 189
Has anyone bought one of these machines? What is your opinion? What features do you like, dislike, etc. If you only had one MIDI tone generator in your setup, would this be it?

I'm seriously considering the 6400 Ultra.

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#13815 - 06/16/00 01:07 PM Re: EMU Ultra series
fvicente Offline
Member

Registered: 01/25/99
Posts: 149
Loc: Port Moody, BC, Canada
Hi Digiboy,

I'll answer your question with another question. What do you want to do with it? It is a sampler and, by its nature, you must load samples into it. Unless you buy one of the ROMs available for it or create your own on flash ROM, you'll have to wait for the loading times.

Will you be using it live where you need instant access to sounds? Using it in the studio or for composing is great though. If this is your only sound source, you may want to go with a synth as well. CD Sample libraries take quite a bit of cash to build up. If you'll be sampling your own source material and you'll be using lots of loops and such, this will be okay too.

Look at your needs first and let that help you decide. I own a E5000 Ultra and love it. It is got an easy to get around OS which is stable and it sounds great. I have a bunch of other synths and modules though.

The only knock I have on it is the fx implementation. The FX implementation sucks. You can't have separate send levels for each multitimbral part. You can only have 4 separate fx send levels for each of the fx. They have a new fx board coming out sometime this summer (RFX-32) which looks like it will be amazing. You'll be able to run practically an effect on each multitimbral part! Hopefully the fx routing will be made a little more flexible at that time too.

Overall, I am extremely happy that I own one.

Fernando

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#13816 - 06/16/00 01:11 PM Re: EMU Ultra series
fvicente Offline
Member

Registered: 01/25/99
Posts: 149
Loc: Port Moody, BC, Canada
Hi Digiboy,

I'll just add too that if you are planning on using it in your studio and you have a reasonably fast PC or Mac, you can maybe compliment the E6400 Ultra with a soft synth or two to get other types of sounds. Especially if you like analog synth sounds, you can spend the equivalent of a sample CD Rom to buy one of these. Then, you can create your own sounds or have ready to go presets.

HTH,
Fernando

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#13817 - 06/19/00 06:23 AM Re: EMU Ultra series
digiboy Offline
Member

Registered: 05/12/00
Posts: 189
Thanks for the RE: fvicente,

I'm mostly interested in being able to generate the sounds of "real" instruments. This will be my primary/first tone generating box, I think, and I need something that will give me some orchestral sounds (strings, brass, woodwinds) as well as some world sounds (sitar, reeds, etc.) I'm not looking to take this live, so load times aren't critical...but I don't want to be sitting around for too long, either.

If I plop in 64 MB of RAM, am I going to be waiting awhile? I'm planning on having the following config:

PC with SCSI host adapter
4 Gig 5400 RPM SCSI HD (formatted for sampler)
8x SCSI CD-ROM

I figure that, since this is my first sampler, I should go with the 6400 to get the 8 CD library as a starter kit.
How are samples on the net? Are the good ones hard to find?

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#13818 - 06/19/00 09:23 PM Re: EMU Ultra series
fvicente Offline
Member

Registered: 01/25/99
Posts: 149
Loc: Port Moody, BC, Canada
Hi Digiboy,

Well, the E-mu's are one of the best samplers around for generating real instruments. While if you were planning on doing mostly drums and bass with it, I would recommend an Akai, the E-mu's are much better IMHO at generating real-sounding instruments.

As you can probably guess, the samples are very important here. You are not going to get great orchestral sounds by searching on the internet. There are some usable sounds on the E-mu CD's supplied but, IMHO, they don't compare with the commercial orchestral sound libraries available. The Kirk Hunter Virtuoso strings, Peter Siedlaczek Advanced Orchestra and Miroslav Vitous Orchestral libraries are great. However, they are quite expensive too and one of these libraries by themselves won't do it all for you.

To get started, there is an orchestral CD by Prosonus (I think it is distributed by Big Fish but I'm not sure) is not bad. It's not in the same league as those others but it can get you started anyway. In terms of world sounds, you can probably find some adequate ones on the internet.

What you will want to do is save some of your most-used banks to the hard drive as loading times will be substantially reduced compared to your CD Rom. While 4 GB is not very much, it should be fine for now as you can leave samples you don't use very often on the CD to load from there.

BTW, you'll want to load up your sampler with 128 MB of RAM eventually. Orchestral sounds (good ones anyway) take up lots of memory.

HTH and good luck,
Fernando

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#13819 - 06/20/00 05:11 AM Re: EMU Ultra series
pko Offline
Member

Registered: 02/15/99
Posts: 89
Loc: Hampshire, England
Hi,

Personally I believe any suggestion that the Akai is better at drums and bass sounds is unfounded. Have you tried and E4 along side an S5000? This is a myth.

You do not need a SCSI drive for the Ultra series, you can fit an internal EIDE drive. The internal EIDE drive is very, very quick and far outperfroms anything you will get over the SCSI 2 interface.

Paul

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#13820 - 06/20/00 07:27 AM Re: EMU Ultra series
digiboy Offline
Member

Registered: 05/12/00
Posts: 189
Wow! Thanks guys for the info. I'm going to a workshop tonight given by the local E-mu rep called "Demystifying sampling".

I wonder if the Ultra can support both IDE and SCSI...that would be a boon, but probably too much to ask.

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#13821 - 06/20/00 01:06 PM Re: EMU Ultra series
fvicente Offline
Member

Registered: 01/25/99
Posts: 149
Loc: Port Moody, BC, Canada
Hi Digiboy,

You're in for a surprise. The Emu Ultra series support both IDE and SCSI disks. I believe that there is room only for one hard drive internally (after adding the HD mounting kit). You can have an IDE HD internally and connect SCSI HD's and CD Roms via the SCSI interface on the back.

Paul,

I did not mean to imply that the E-mu is unusable for drum sounds. This is purely a matter of taste. In some situations, the E-mu will be better than an Akai for drum sounds. However, I have found that for pop, hip-hop, etc. type of drum sounds, the Akai has a certain crispness and punch that I like for those styles. When doing jazz-style drums, the E-mu has a warmer tone which sometimes lends itself better.

Don't get too hung up on the gear itself. At the end of the day it should be what works best for you. When you look at it, these samplers are just boxes with circuit boards and wires inside of them.

Good luck Digiboy.
Fernando

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