Emu Proteus 2000?

Just wondered if anyone has got one or had one and would recommend it. I'm looking at possibly getting a Proteus 2000 after I heard the sounds on Youtube. Also I'm wondering how easy it is to program and edit in real time. Thoughts welcome. Cheers guys.

try saving up a bit of cash and spending more than £150 on crap gear you will get bored of in 6 months. sounds harsh but believe me - i've done it myself years ago: you get on ebay/gumtree, search "synthesizer" or "drum machine" and get excited that there's stuff on there for cheap. buy it, claim it's brilliant, buy some more, then after a few months you realise why it's cheap and end up flogging it yourself. usually with a small loss. seriously man, just save for a bit and get some better stuff that will keep your interest and be usable for much longer.

edit: for the £95 you spent on the JV-1080 plus whatever these cost nowadays (£150ish?) you would be half way towards something like a Roland JX-3P, and for just a little bit more than that a Juno 106. both of these would give you so many more options and quality of sound than a shit load of cheap ROMplers.

the px grooveboxes and 2500 arent too bad for romplers but why bother in this day and age when pro sample vsts sound tons better

I have what's essentially an E-mu Proteus 2000 in the form of nine SoundFonts. It's pretty useful for bread-and-butter sounds such as acoustic guitars and the like. Whether you should use these sounds depends very much on your style, and whether you should get a tangible hardware Proteus rather than just buy the samples by themselves depends on your setup and how you like to work.

  On 5/17/2011 at 2:18 PM, BCM said:

try saving up a bit of cash and spending more than £150 on crap gear you will get bored of in 6 months. sounds harsh but believe me - i've done it myself years ago: you get on ebay/gumtree, search "synthesizer" or "drum machine" and get excited that there's stuff on there for cheap. buy it, claim it's brilliant, buy some more, then after a few months you realise why it's cheap and end up flogging it yourself. usually with a small loss. seriously man, just save for a bit and get some better stuff that will keep your interest and be usable for much longer.

 

edit: for the £95 you spent on the JV-1080 plus whatever these cost nowadays (£150ish?) you would be half way towards something like a Roland JX-3P, and for just a little bit more than that a Juno 106. both of these would give you so many more options and quality of sound than a shit load of cheap ROMplers.

Fair point dude. I just want something that's fairly easily editable. I'm only gonna probably get one more piece of gear before I invest in a new PC I reckon. I'd be open to getting some analogue stuff but one I'm not too obsessed about having the analogue sound and two that stuff is just too expensive for me. I heard the sounds of the Proteus on Youtube and they sounded pretty reasonable for a ROMpler I thought. After that it really boils down to how easily one can edit it with the filters, asdr, lfos etc. For me spending a few hundred on a few Romplers is no big deal imo. I've always had Korg rompler and used it in my music so they have their uses. :-)

  On 5/17/2011 at 5:32 PM, Promo said:

After that it really boils down to how easily one can edit it with the filters, asdr, lfos etc.

Exactly. But don't you find it easier to edit a SoundFont in a software synthesiser? I haven't used a real Proteus 2000 (the only hardware ROMpler I've used was a U-220 I had aaages ago), but I can't imagine it's less fiddly than NN-XT (or, say, ESX-24, Kontakt, or whatever).

The Solar Bears used a Proteus a lot on their album.

But seriously, don't let that encourage you. Get something analog to go with your JV-1080.

  On 5/17/2011 at 2:03 PM, Promo said:

Just wondered if anyone has got one or had one and would recommend it. I'm looking at possibly getting a Proteus 2000 after I heard the sounds on Youtube. Also I'm wondering how easy it is to program and edit in real time. Thoughts welcome. Cheers guys.

if you're tantalized by one of these emu fings,

get an XL-7 instead.

  On 5/17/2011 at 5:32 PM, Promo said:

  On 5/17/2011 at 2:18 PM, BCM said:

try saving up a bit of cash and spending more than £150 on crap gear you will get bored of in 6 months. sounds harsh but believe me - i've done it myself years ago: you get on ebay/gumtree, search "synthesizer" or "drum machine" and get excited that there's stuff on there for cheap. buy it, claim it's brilliant, buy some more, then after a few months you realise why it's cheap and end up flogging it yourself. usually with a small loss. seriously man, just save for a bit and get some better stuff that will keep your interest and be usable for much longer.

 

edit: for the £95 you spent on the JV-1080 plus whatever these cost nowadays (£150ish?) you would be half way towards something like a Roland JX-3P, and for just a little bit more than that a Juno 106. both of these would give you so many more options and quality of sound than a shit load of cheap ROMplers.

Fair point dude. I just want something that's fairly easily editable. I'm only gonna probably get one more piece of gear before I invest in a new PC I reckon. I'd be open to getting some analogue stuff but one I'm not too obsessed about having the analogue sound and two that stuff is just too expensive for me. I heard the sounds of the Proteus on Youtube and they sounded pretty reasonable for a ROMpler I thought. After that it really boils down to how easily one can edit it with the filters, asdr, lfos etc. For me spending a few hundred on a few Romplers is no big deal imo. I've always had Korg rompler and used it in my music so they have their uses. :-)

fair enough :)

  On 5/17/2011 at 10:20 PM, hahathhat said:

  On 5/17/2011 at 2:03 PM, Promo said:

Just wondered if anyone has got one or had one and would recommend it. I'm looking at possibly getting a Proteus 2000 after I heard the sounds on Youtube. Also I'm wondering how easy it is to program and edit in real time. Thoughts welcome. Cheers guys.

if you're tantalized by one of these emu fings,

get an XL-7 instead.

Thanks I'll look into it.

  On 5/17/2011 at 6:34 PM, ZoeB said:

  On 5/17/2011 at 5:32 PM, Promo said:

After that it really boils down to how easily one can edit it with the filters, asdr, lfos etc.

 

Exactly. But don't you find it easier to edit a SoundFont in a software synthesiser? I haven't used a real Proteus 2000 (the only hardware ROMpler I've used was a U-220 I had aaages ago), but I can't imagine it's less fiddly than NN-XT (or, say, ESX-24, Kontakt, or whatever).

I remember playing with Soundfonts a while back on my sister's pc as the soundcard was more capable but thanks I'll look into downloading some and playing with them. Incidentally I played with a Roland U-220 a long long time ago - something like 18 years when I first started making electronic music at school lol!

also it's not like the only good hardware synths are analog. There are plenty of deep and great sounding digital synths out there. I've got an MS2000 and it's fantastic. I've also got an electribe and a cz-101 which get regular use. If you're going to get something cheepy then at the very least go for something usual or less straight down the middle.

you certainly could, however, make some phat beats.

phat

looks like the orbit might be more interesting actually, just for all the 1991 stabby synths. :D I'd rock that shit.

Another option is that Digital Sound Factory do a variety of the Proteus 2000 era Emu sound modules in Kontakt format. I got the Proteus 2000 one a good while back for pretty cheap when they were having a sale. But I think it suffers pretty badly in that format. Weirdly, it's probably easier to find sounds on the hardware unit as I understand that there is sound category search function whereas the Kontakt library is just a huge group of sounds split into 7 banks with no real descriptions. So you're left just scrolling through hoping the name of a patch will give a hint. Another issue with the Kontakt format is that all the filtering is done using Kontakt's own filters (i.e. no multiple sampling of different filter settings) so you miss out on Emu z-plan filtering. Which is a big part of the appeal, see here - http://homepage.mac.com/synth_seal/html/morpheus.html - for more info on that sort of filtering. Likewise for the FX engine.

As for the sounds themselves, I found them to be overly repetative. Too many miniscule variations on stock "real" instruments... how many 90's rompler versions of a bass guitar or electric piano do we need? Not enough lush synthetic pads and such like you would get on Roland or Korg rompler. That said, if those sounds float your boat you'll be like an 8 year old on xmas morning with this synth.

proteus is just a rompler, or in other words, a preset machine. Has somewhat decent sounds, and it is good to have at least one bread and butter midi playback device, but it is nothing special.

I've never used one, but just by virtue of it having a modulation matrix as well as other control of parameters, it has the potential to be a deep machine if you're willing to dive into it (I'm not).

I'd get one if I were hudson mohawk.