E-mu Beat Garden ROM

Price Paid: Euro (150) used

Ease of Use: 8
Editting is on the PK-6 very easy thanks to the knobs matrix. I don't know about a patch editor for PC, for the PK-6 or Proteus series.

Features: 8
I use it in a PK-6 which has 64 notes polyphony, which is enough for me, because I use several other sound generators besides it.

Expressiveness/Sounds: 9
Very nice sounds, although some of the samples have too much midfrequency resonance. Very usefull though, because it adds life to the sounds.

Reliability: 10
100% on the ROM , although the software on the PK-6 is sometimes a bit unpredictable..

Customer Support: 9
The company gave me support on how to select the presets. Good support, although the product is discontinued

Overall Rating: 9
It's worth the price, gives you a lot of good samples and fine presets for the price

Submitted by Borque at 04/13/2005 05:24

Price Paid: US $100

Ease of Use: 10
Easy, its a SIMM chip, just pop it in and go.

Features: 10
The Beat Garden is mostly drums, percussion and basses, with various pad, synth and choir sounds mixed in. I am very impressed with the sounds on this ROM. The sound designer, Rob Papen, did an excellent job. I have not heard his Techno Synth Construction Yard ROM, but I would imagine it is of comparable quality. Good luck finding one. Both the Rob Papen ROMS are discontinued.

Expressiveness/Sounds: 10
Drums and percussion: Excellent, better than any EMU ROM I have besides the World Expedition. The World Expedition has velocity layered samples and Beat Garden does not seem to. I have not heard the Protean Drums ROM so I cant compare it to that. The Beat Garden has a good variety of immaculately sampled acoustic and electric drums, as well as hand percussion and makes an excellent companion to the World Expedition ROM.

Basses: Very good, lots of variety and all nice and full sounding. My only gripe is a lot of the bass presets have echo on them, which may be OK for techno, but muddies up the sound in my opinion. That can be removed and then saved to a user preset. Still, why should I have to do that?

Beats and Arps: the BTS presets and arps on this ROM are great, Papen really knows how to program.

Pads: Very good, and well programmed to react to the realtime control knobs and mod wheel.

Choirs: Good. A lot of them sound the same to me though.

FX: Great, lots of trippy stuff.

Synths: Good analog sounding stuff, but no EPs or organ sounds to speak of.

There are some guitar chord hits but I have no real use for them.

Reliability: N/A
It a SIMM, they rarely go bad.

Customer Support: 5
E-MU is OK, but since they stopped selling hardware synths, it is bound to go downhill fast.

Overall Rating: 10
I would buy it again. The other E-MU ROMs I own are the World Expedition, Sounds of the ZR, Vintage Collection and Pure Phatt. The Beat Garden has the best drum sounds I've heard besides the World Exp., and the best bass sounds hands down, even better than the Phatt IMO. Now I've got all the drum and percussion sounds I could ever need. And almost every single preset is actually usable right out of the box, unlike some of the E-MU ROMs, where you have to really edit the patches to get the most out of them. Good job, Mr. Papen!

Submitted by Anonymous at 10/06/2004 08:09

Price Paid: US $120

Ease of Use: 9
P2k roms are easy to pop in. Takes 1 minute.

Features: N/A
It's a rom.

Expressiveness/Sounds: 8
As appropriate for a rom named Beat Garden, its got a lot of percussive sounds. The percussion samples are top notch. I wish i had the Drum rom to compare with it. The majority of the samples are geared toward modern sounding drums/hits , but there are plenty of normal kits too. One of the main reasons i bought it was the Jungle kits, they are good, and i'm too lazy to program my own. Lots of DnB/Jungle-style sounds in general on this rom, covers most of the sounds for those genres.

Another thing i really liked was the electronic snares. They are perfect for Industrial music. Same goes for the enormous collections of hits/percussive sound effects. (they are good, not like some of the cheesy hits on the other roms)

The basses are top notch as well. Lots of unique sounding stuff. There are a couple Hoover-style DnB basses with nice modulation effects controlled by the modwheel. There are quite a few trance-style basses too.

The guitars sound good, but i play guitar myself so they are lost on me. Most of the guitar presets are in Arp form - which sound like someone is strumming some funk chords. Would be ok for House-type stuff.

The synths, voxes, and pads are really nice. I wasnt expecting so many, and they are good quality. There are a couple choir patches that sound better than anything else in the P2k soundset IMO. The string patches are nice too.

Reliability: 7
It's a rom, so unless you take it out and kick it around on the floor, it's not gonna break. I've owned 7 Emu roms and none of them have messed up on me ever.

Customer Support: 8
Emu is generally very helpful, but since they don't sell their hardware products anymore they are getting a little crappy in this area.

Overall Rating: 8
Overall, I'd say if you want some great sounds that go beyond the normal drum kits, Beat Garden is your rom. Especially if you need some sounds for DnB, Jungle, or Industrial. I would definitely use the basses and vox/choirs on this over the other roms.

Beat Garden was done by Rob Papen, and was programmed very well. You can hear some mp3 demos of the Beat Garden presets on his website.

Submitted by isosceles at 05/22/2004 14:33