Price Paid: US $199.00 used
Ease of Use: 10
It's a ROM SIMM chip, plug and play.
Features: 9
Lots of very realistic acoustic and electric drum samples. GM Drum Maps !! Woo Hoo!!
Expressiveness/Sounds: 9
This is the rare Protean Drum ROM that comes stock in the PX7 Command Station, and is no longer made. For this ROM, E-MU departed from their usual practice of packing a ROM with hundreds and hundreds of small samples and instead chose quality over quantity. The drum samples are quite excellent, even the cymbals(for a change). Many of the drums have up to five velocity layers, allowing for great realism and expression. The acoustic kits are great and although I'm no connoisseur of electric drum sounds, they sound good to me.
That being said, the other sounds that are not drums are a mixed bag. I was not that impressed with the hand and tuned percussion. The World Expedition ROM blows it away in this area. (These two ROMs together form a lethal combination of drum & percussion sounds). There are a few basses, some keyboard and sound effects on the Protean Drum ROM. The basses are decent, but the rest of the sounds are pretty bad and seem like filler. Still, it is billed as a DRUM ROM, and thats what they used most of the memory for, so I cant really complain about the other sounds.
Reliability: 10
ROMs dont fail very often.
Customer Support: 7
Their tech support has responded pretty well to my emails in the past, considering they dont even make hardware modules anymore.
Overall Rating: 9
I had been looking for one of these for my MP7 Command Station for some time. They pop up on EBAY every now and then, and get snatched up pretty quickly. The MP7 ROM probably has better drum sounds for Hip Hop\R&B styles, but for acoustic drums, you cant beat this ROM. It's definitely got the best drum sounds I've ever heard from a ROMpler. I would buy it again.
Submitted by Anonymous at 01/21/2005 15:55
