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

Ah ! if only you could go on and develop a little further on your working 
methods (I'm sure you've got some ass kicking tricks left to share with 
us.....Organisation , efficiency is what crackhead musicians like me need 
the most...just to stop loosing presets or giving away messy projects !)
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Here's some random rEalm tips for organizing:

- Always save your Presets independently for each Pattern. (actually this 
is a drK tip I use a lot).  That way you avoid accidentally erasing or 
overwriting a Preset that may be in use in another Pattern.
- Save your Presets with a name that reflects the Pattern name too.  Ie, 
if you Pattern is called "Composite Blue" (hehehe), call your Presets Blue 
Bass, Blue BD, Blue Snare, etc.  Don't just use names like "Preset 1", or 
something too vague to know what it is later on.
- Delete the factory Patterns, make your own music instead :)
- Overwrite the factory Presets that are doubled in the User banks with 
the Default Preset (usually the last one in each ROM).  That way, it's 
very easy to see where your next free User Preset when you're working and 
want to save a Preset.  These are the same as the Presets in the non-User 
banks, so you're not losing anything.
- Back up daily. The last thing I do each day after working on the XL-7, 
is to E-load all of my Patterns to the computer.  Use a separate folder 
for each day, and name it with the date.  That way if you accidentally 
change something and save it to the PC by mistake, you can always go back 
and get it from an earlier date.  MIDI data is tiny compared to today's 
huge harddrives, so it's not about saving space anymore.
- The above is also true for Presets.  If I've made changes to a Preset 
bank by saving new Presets, or tweaking old ones, I'll do a Preset Bank 
dump into SX.  I use a seperate track for each day,a nd name it according 
to the bank, ie "05-28-03 BankA".  Don't forget to burn yourself a back up 
CD of this and the Patterns once in awhile too, hard drives DO fail.

More:
- Unless it's critical to your Pattern, use the Erase Events function to 
strip away Aftertouch data in your patterns on all tracks.  It just takes 
up space, and is one more thing trying to compete for transfer space in 
your midi setup.  Again, this only applies if you don't use AT as a 
controller for something.
- The same can be said of controller data, thin it out or erase it if it's 
not needed, or if you plan on tweaking manually live.
- Save often.  No, seriously, save often.  Did you get that?  SAVE OFTEN! 
As you work, it's easy to forget to save, and then you accidentally tweak 
something beyond repair and you have to start over.  If you're really 
anal, you can even save to a new location everytime, so that you have a 
chronological record of your work for the day.  You can tweak with 
impunity then, and always know you can go back to an earlier version of 
your Pattern/Song.  At the end of the day, just pick the one Pattern that 
you feel is the best of the day (usually this is the last one), and delete 
the rest.

Hope those help, just stuff off the top of my head.  If it looks like a 
pain in the ass to do all that, just remember a moment of inconvenience is 
better than a lifetime of regret....

rEalm






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