EMU & ENSONIQ ROMS RUNNING AWAY!!!!! 

Brethren not to brag, but have them all. Back in the mid 2000s I went on a scavenger hunt to build a complete P2K set. Doing so put me in a bit of gear debt, but was worth it. As I likely wouldn’t be able to do it in ‘23. It truly is amazing the current prices these pieces go for now. But the versatility afforded by having them makes for endless creativity. My E-MU collection has affectionately been named the “EMUSEUM”. These days, I find myself exploring the depths of the Morpheus and Ultra Proteus. From memory, the hardest rom to get was the “Holy Grail”, as there are lots of fakes out there. For those looking to embark on this journey. Happy Hunting ✌🏾👍🏾✊🏾

The cheapest way to get into that E-mu hardware sound is to buy a sampler in the ESI range, you can still pick them up really cheaply. I retrofitted my old ESI 32 that I bought back in the day with a Gotek drive, and it came free with a USB pen crammed full of factory disks/ROM stuff. It's best to pick up a unit with maxxed out RAM and the Turbo Kit, as the board has a bunch of additional I/Os, FX, and 17 filters from their Morpheus Z-plane synthesizer.

I bought an emu e5000 sampler that had an 80g hard drive fitted with all the ROM presets from all the EMU range from the start (early emulator synths/samplers) up to the various sound modules and well as a shedload of other Roland/Akai/Yamaha other synth ROM sets and sounds. The E5000 has thousands of banks of sounds. I can guarantee you’d never get bored of sounds to use!

You brought me to Planet Phatt and Mo, & I’ve never looked back!

I lucked out when I bought my PX-7 that was also stocked with MP-7, XL-7 and the Vintage Keys ROMS. My next move is to get an E-mu sampler and find the even more rare blank ROMs.

Those are powerful machines the presets you will get tired of but you can combine your sounds and making new ones along with adding effects to them so those machines get really deep if you spend time with them. The filters are second to none

I own both the Proteus 2000 and the Mo Phatt module that are nearly maxed out with rare ROMs. What I did is just buy the hardware sound modules an just pull the ROM cards out them and move over to my Proteus 2000 and then keep the extra Proteus module for parts. Infact that's what I did with my Mo Phatt that's sitting on my shelf as a parts machine for spare parts for my Proteus 2000 since the hardware is identically the same.

You are overlooked. Great content.

If u want these sounds u can buy the Kontakt version online for less than 30dollars and have the full library. I have one but I miss having the actual drum machine.

Every time I buy one of these products, they come with a surprise in them like Beat Garden or XL ROM. I also have composer and MP7 ROMs. My 2000 slots are full. They are getting expensive.

I'm glad I expanded my MP-7 command station 20 years ago. I got up on the world percussion rom, XL-7 rom, and a memory expander ROM.

So this is why they call certain sampler based devices Romplers? That's a revelation right there.

Seems like new modules could be homebrewed with modern flash chips instead of ROMs, so you could load them with your own sounds. I can't imagine there's any encryption or fancy copy protection on the original modules, so the contents could be copied. If whatever's left of E-MU cared, they could build up and release new modules.

Sadly not just E-MU ROM's. Kurzweil, Ensoniq,Quasimidi,and a few other expansions are getting hard to find and pricey.

yup I still have my proteus 2500 and Xl-1 and I have the expansion ram cards for turbophatt and few others laying around somewhere...thinking about putting a few on reverb cuz some just sitting around not being used😆

The Holy Grail Piano Rom is almost impossible to find.

you remember that huge snare drum from whodini's tune "funky beat"? well i found out through a forum that was on a certain preset card for a drum machine (ive got it written down somewhere i dont have it to hand) but there is no way to find that online at all! its a rock drum kit but man i remember that whodini record blew my mind when it came out. ill find it one day haha! great video!

The Amazing Race with hardware now.

secondary market synth scene is straight up insane these days...

J Dilla had the keyboard version of the Mo Phatt

I've had my Proteus 2000 and Mo Phatt for over 15yrs (mo phatt card's been in the proteus for about 10 of those yrs) and there was a time when I wanted everything Emu had to offer but Im good. I copped some wav files and Kontakt instrument versions of most of the others so if Im dropping $ on hardware it ain't Emu these days

The vintage keys pro rom is ridiculously expensive 🤦🏿‍♂️ I'm lovely my mo' phatt but i need that vintage keys rom to complete my rack module.

I just bought a Proteus 2000. Seems like a lot of people are digging through rack synths right now.

Yeah people go more nuts for these EMU ROMs than anything else. The Roland SRX cards are very expensive too, but there seems to be consistently diehard EMU fans who gotta have them all as you say - but also as you say they're just not enough out there bevause there wasn't a hgue install base of them originally. When EMU/Creative got shut down, they sold off the rights to sell the sound library to another company - I bought the Planet Phatt soundset in Soundfont format and its terrible, its nothing like the real thing. I've got the free Proteus VX which is the Proteus 2000 "Composer" soundset - I had the PK-6 back in the day and did not like it. I liked the Protean drum sounds one, in the PX-7, that I regret selling

I've got loads of the actual hardware ones and you can now donwload them and if you have an emu sampler you can put them on a SD card and have all of them to use inside the Ultra.

I have a few of them including the planet earth which imo is the dopest one. That mf is outrageously expensive & very hard to find these days. Also have an extra mo phatt rom I just haven’t gotten around to selling.

E-Mu had good sounds because they had all the libraries from the Emulator 3 that legit musicians worked on. But then Roland had the guys who made the Zero-G sample CDs making sounds for them. There’s a couple people making copies of E-Mu ROMs now. The samplers can burn them. The hard part is getting the blank SIMMs. But it looks like you can just about get anything for $200. It’s kinda sad how Reverb/eBay is just full of E-Mu modules with missing ROMs. A lot of UK composers got a Proteus 2000 then just got ROMs for it because that was the only 128-voice model they could get with all the outputs because they didn’t sell Turbo upgrades overseas. It’s a strange situation with those 64-voice modules. You got the Planet Earth which is hard to find but I think that’s just because they didn’t sell many, because it’s not much different from the Proteus/3, and the Proteus/3 has more outputs.

guys, stop talking