Hi there,
first I have to say I'm nowhere near my sampler but after experiencing the lack of different envelopes per zone on my MPC 4000 (which maybe will have to go for this reason at least) I made some thoughts about layering drums in the emu.
First of all one very big advantage of the emu over the mpc is that it is not limited to just 4 layers per key but instead I guess 128 voices (and its 128mb RAM in my case) and its possibility to set up different cords/filters/chorus/envelopes/LFOs/etc per voice/layer. Incredible as we're still speaking about a single preset.
There's just one thing the MPC has a nice trick for layering up drums: You can set a sample offset individually per zone (which equals to voices in emu-language). So you can set the first layer on a certain key to trigger immediately at the push of that key and the second layer to start a few (or a lot of) samples later. This is especially nice if samples aren't cut up perfectly or if you like/want that sloppy sound (which I do).
So actually it would be nice to combine this sample offset feature into the emu, but I have no parameter in mind which could do that. There is the possibility to alter the samplestartpoint (via midi for example) but you'd cut off the very beginning of the sound instead of moving the whole sample before the other one like it is on the MPC 4000.
So basically what the MPC does is adding silence in front of a layer if you shift it behind or the other layer forwards. How to do that in the Emu?
Well I think, as it is not possible to add silence before the sample with its parameters set in its voice (like above mentioned envelopes and filters and so on)
there might be a compromise.
We need a third sample which only consists of a few samples/ms of silence which will be pasted in front of our two individual drumsamples.
You then could use the "SStart" Cord Destination wired with a very small amount (which should give a higher resolution and we just need to scroll around the beginning of the transient) to a midicontroller. After finding a good offset for the samples via that midicontroller assigned to SStart, we'd alter the envelopes a bit and resample the whole new sample and cut off excess silence in the beginning of our new created sound.
Sounds fairly complex in the beginng but I think loading up predefined presets for that purpose might give that worklow quite a boost in time. Also with resampling internally and the quite good truncating algorithm, we'd not introduce much noise or a delayed sample.
Of course there is the possibility to use your sequencer and offset the two samples via two seperate midi tracks. This way you wouldn't have to to alter the envelopes after finding a good offset between the two midinotes. The disadvantage might be any sort of bad miditiming so you'd have to resample a few passes and picking the best one. Also you'd need to utilize another tool the sequencer but I think most of you guys are working with a DAW so this won't be a big drawback.
Maybe one of the variations of the possibility to do the sample offset thing with a midi sequencer might be the emus INTERNAL sequencer but I never even touched it so I'm not quite sure whether it is possible to shift midi notes in a very small amount. Maybe anyone of you guys might now this.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Perhaps someone might try one of the three suggested workflows as I'll be able to touch my emu again in three weeks the earliest.
Cheers