Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

I just bought my XL7 (like last week), so maybe I can give you a fresh
user's viewpoint of it comparitively...I have only used a 505 a few times,
but have used the mc-303 a bit more in depthly, and must say right off of
the bat, the only thing I really found appealing about the 505 was the light
sensor modulator...if Roland were a bit wiser, they would release a
standalone ligth sensor that could be programmed to modulate any form of
midi cc#, THAT I would buy! The only 3 things roland has released in the
last 6 years or so that have even slighty kept my interest were the 8080,
the dj2000, and the almighty mc-80 (which, I might add, I would have bought
instead of an XL7 if it had much larger ram capacity for midi notes).
In any case, enough babble, the XL7 IS great at what it does, but is fairly
bizarre to understand at first, mostly because the interface is very
lacking, imho, in intuitive natural controllability. Yes, it's internal
sounds are great, fairly flexible programibility for them as well (much more
than I had expected)...the resonance of the filters blows total chunks
though....a tad bit glitchy here and there still as well (digital hiccups
and what not). The sequencer is great and easy to use, the arpeggios are
extremely flexible in terms of programming, more so than any I've seen, and
you (seemingly) have alot of control over, well, alot of stuff. My biggest
complaint about it, is that everything is primarily orientated towards
useing the internal rom sound...I'm talking like a 80 to 20% lean
here....this box just dosnt like to play all that well with others. At first
I thought the thing was buggy, but am slowly learning thats it's more that
it's just wierd and unnatural in it's ways. Alot of things you may want to
do (like control your external synth with an arpeggio, setup a blank pattern
to be used for external gear, or even just changing some of the preset roms
in a pattern without changing them all) are all possible, but require a
large amount of sweet talking and finagleing work arounds in time consuming
and just down right odd ways...imHo, many of these things should be second
nature to it, but it seems more like it was designed with these things on
the back burner so to speak, almost like they were last minute additions to
it that were not integrated very thouroughly into the flux of things.
Oh, yea, the key pads blow as well.
All that aside, if what you are looking for is a 'groove' box on steroids,
then the XL7 is definately it...it blows the competition out of the water in
those regards. If all I wanted to do was make partially pre-programmed music
using only one synth engine, so that all of my music would have an uncanny
similarity to it, then this would by far be the box to do it with.
ByronE

--
Chaos exists as raw material from which to create order.

-Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade

-----Original Message-----
From: vsr123 [mailto:vsr123@...]
Sent: Monday, June 24, 2002 3:27 PM
To: xl7@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [xl7] Help MC-505 vs. XL-7


Folks
      I couldnt find a similar post and am new to this group. I was
wondering if any of you had suggestions regarding a XL-7 vs. an MC-
505 unit from a beginners perspective? Which one is easier to pick up
and understand? I am interested in trying some of my own mixes of
other tracks/samples and then maybe trying something on my own.

thanks in advance for your help
vsr



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