emusonacid!

Hi im new to music and i own a emu 500, my question is how do you get a filter sweep , how would i set this up on the sampler please help.

So, you want to do a filter sweep do ya? You want your drums to sound like they are going underwater or turning into paper thin shrill hits huh?

Well, then... Your gonna love this. But don't tell anyone on here. This will be our little secret.

You take a midi cc (like your modulation will on your keyboard... oh what the hell. Lets use that) and you route it with your filter and then you move that control and as you play the sound... you get a filter sweep. Pretty cool...

But since you probably didn't quite get that... Here we go. This is the cord setting to get yummy filter sweeps. We will do a lpf (Low Pass Filter) and make your drums sound like they are going under water.

You go into your modulation matrix. Go to a cord. It doesn't really matter what line you chose and set the cord up like this.

Modwhl>FiltFreq>-100%.

You may have to adjust the percentage to 100 percent, I can't remember which way works the best. It's second nature for me. So you play your drums and you move your mod wheel and you should hear some freaky wierd pitch detuning and the filter opening and closing. The reason for this is because I forgot to tell you to shut down the modwhl>LFO cord. So go ahead and take the mod wheel to nothing or to pitch wheel . It just doesn't matter. Just as long as your modwheel is no longer tied to the lfo.

Now try it again.

You should hear those drums sound as if they are going underwater.

That is your filter sweep. If you don't hear anything happen. Invert the percentage.

So now you can do filter sweeps. Lets break it down just a bit. The modulation wheel is your "source" in the mod matrix. The FiltFreq is your "Destination." So you need your source to control your destination. Once you get this concept down, You will be able to do insane things. You can also choose just about any controller you want to use. You can sometimes get away with using the pan cc's in your sequencer. The midi A thur G or whatever are the best to use though.

Want to have more fun. Take an adsr... specificually the Filter adsr but it doesn't matter what you use and set the adsr as source and your destination as filterfreq. Once you do that, tweak the shape of the adsr and you will get changes in the sound by just holding the key down. You can have the filter open slowly as you hold the key down, or go up and down realy fast. It's all up to you.

oh, watch out of the zplain fitlers. They will blow your head off. Those are the peak shelf and morph filters. the ones at the end. Very dangerous. I have hurt my ears on those filters a few times, and almost blew speakers. hee hee.

Have fun. Anymore questions. Give a shout.

snh

thanks for your help that has got me started and i think i understand cords a bit better now but i have another question for you , here goes.
Is it possible to sync the sweep to the tempo of the music and if so how can i achive this . Also dont know if you can help but i hope so . i have a Edirol PCR-30 midi controller and i dont understand how to assign controllers on the emu 5000 to the assinable knobs and sliders on the PCR-30 .please point me in the right direction many thanks,

You could set the source as an lfo and then set the destination to filtfreq. Then once you do that, you can try and adjust the speed by hand or use the arpeggiator to get the lfo to sync. You set the bpm in the arpeggiator screen. I can't remember exactly how to do that off the top of my head. I would have to be infront of my emu to remember. Like I said, this stuff has gotten second nature and hard to explain.

Another idea is to use clock divisiors for you source. Those can act like an lfo but are a bit eaiser to understand. They act more like a Square Wave Lfo so it depends on what kind of sound you are going for.

I am sure if you look into the earliest threads you should see one addressing the arpeggiator timing control. This is kind of a tricky thing to do also.

Another idea is to just draw those cc's in.

As for your controller. I don't know too much about that. I would assume if you have a knob on that controller that is labeled midi 1 then that would corresponde to midi A in the emu's mod matrix. That data would be found on Midi CC channel 21, unless you have gone and fucked that all up.

Hope this helps out.

snh

Hey man thanks a lot for your help