E-MU Beat Garden ROM

Its a lovely EMU expansion ROM, easy peasy to install.

Its a ROM card for EMU Proteus 2000 line.

If you have any of the Proteus line of expandable rack moduals a fully workng EMU expansion ROM is an absolute treasure, all the ROM's from what ive heard so far are usefull in there own way, the mighty Beat Garden ROM is one the best for ARP's Bass n pads, and forshure the percussion is well worth it, but it's really the Proteus architecture combined with the samples that truly gets me and other Proteus addicts wet im shure. The sound yu get of these units is forshure unique, the ol digi but beuty step you hear in slow filter sweeps is just lovely these day's and the Rez is amazing, pure bliss, you can forshure tell by the quality of the Beat Garden and other EMU ROMS that allot of time and effort went into making the samples work with the Proteus architecture. These ROM's/Samples are heads above any sample C.D. or Sftware ROM player, loads more inspiring to, skinny little rack with so much power!! The bass on this rOM is heafty.

EMU expansion ROM.

This ROM is forshure worth the investment, I also own the Vintage, Composer, Pure Phatt, XL-1, Techno and Protozoa ROM's. I absolutly adore my EMU board's and forshure couldn't live without em, that lovely REZ yu get of these units is priceless on a big filter sweep n some digi delay, pure dreamy type stuff. Thankyou EMU!

Mine came with my Mp-7, so I basically got if for free (Payed $290 for Mp7 with MoPhat and Beat Garden). Installation takes 5 minutes.

Lots of bass, synth, perc, drum and arp sounds. Over 500 different sounds.

Beat Garden, the name only says a part of the story. I was hoping for more perc and drum sounds, but only about 20% of sounds are percussive and beats. Nearly half the sounds are basses and pads, it should be called a Bass Garden. Since I already have Protozoa, Xl and MP installed, I have all the bass and synth I nedd. The beats that are there are pretty good, but I wish there were more 808/909 kits in there, some old Korg and Casio kits would be nice, too. I guess I can't complain, since I got it for free and there is no other roms with more perc than this. The basses, synths and arps are pretty good, but it would be really nice if at least half the sounds were just kits. It's an Ok rom, a nice addition to Mp7, but the name is misleading.

Haven't stepped on it yet, so I guess it's reliable.

They should have more demos and info of these roms on the net.

Overall, it's a pretty good rom, a nice addtion to a command station, but if I had it in a keyboard, I would propably trade it for a vintage rom.

Editting is on the PK-6 very easy thanks to the knobs matrix. I don't know about a patch editor for PC, for the PK-6 or Proteus series.

I use it in a PK-6 which has 64 notes polyphony, which is enough for me, because I use several other sound generators besides it.

Very nice sounds, although some of the samples have too much midfrequency resonance. Very usefull though, because it adds life to the sounds.

100% on the ROM , although the software on the PK-6 is sometimes a bit unpredictable..

The company gave me support on how to select the presets. Good support, although the product is discontinued

It's worth the price, gives you a lot of good samples and fine presets for the price

Easy, its a SIMM chip, just pop it in and go.

The Beat Garden is mostly drums, percussion and basses, with various pad, synth and choir sounds mixed in. I am very impressed with the sounds on this ROM. The sound designer, Rob Papen, did an excellent job. I have not heard his Techno Synth Construction Yard ROM, but I would imagine it is of comparable quality. Good luck finding one. Both the Rob Papen ROMS are discontinued.

Drums and percussion: Excellent, better than any EMU ROM I have besides the World Expedition. The World Expedition has velocity layered samples and Beat Garden does not seem to. I have not heard the Protean Drums ROM so I cant compare it to that. The Beat Garden has a good variety of immaculately sampled acoustic and electric drums, as well as hand percussion and makes an excellent companion to the World Expedition ROM.

Basses: Very good, lots of variety and all nice and full sounding. My only gripe is a lot of the bass presets have echo on them, which may be OK for techno, but muddies up the sound in my opinion. That can be removed and then saved to a user preset. Still, why should I have to do that?

Beats and Arps: the BTS presets and arps on this ROM are great, Papen really knows how to program.

Pads: Very good, and well programmed to react to the realtime control knobs and mod wheel.

Choirs: Good. A lot of them sound the same to me though.

FX: Great, lots of trippy stuff.

Synths: Good analog sounding stuff, but no EPs or organ sounds to speak of.

There are some guitar chord hits but I have no real use for them.

It a SIMM, they rarely go bad.

E-MU is OK, but since they stopped selling hardware synths, it is bound to go downhill fast.

I would buy it again. The other E-MU ROMs I own are the World Expedition, Sounds of the ZR, Vintage Collection and Pure Phatt. The Beat Garden has the best drum sounds I've heard besides the World Exp., and the best bass sounds hands down, even better than the Phatt IMO. Now I've got all the drum and percussion sounds I could ever need. And almost every single preset is actually usable right out of the box, unlike some of the E-MU ROMs, where you have to really edit the patches to get the most out of them. Good job, Mr. Papen!

P2k roms are easy to pop in. Takes 1 minute.

It's a rom.

As appropriate for a rom named Beat Garden, its got a lot of percussive sounds. The percussion samples are top notch. I wish i had the Drum rom to compare with it. The majority of the samples are geared toward modern sounding drums/hits , but there are plenty of normal kits too. One of the main reasons i bought it was the Jungle kits, they are good, and i'm too lazy to program my own. Lots of DnB/Jungle-style sounds in general on this rom, covers most of the sounds for those genres.

Another thing i really liked was the electronic snares. They are perfect for Industrial music. Same goes for the enormous collections of hits/percussive sound effects. (they are good, not like some of the cheesy hits on the other roms)

The basses are top notch as well. Lots of unique sounding stuff. There are a couple Hoover-style DnB basses with nice modulation effects controlled by the modwheel. There are quite a few trance-style basses too.

The guitars sound good, but i play guitar myself so they are lost on me. Most of the guitar presets are in Arp form - which sound like someone is strumming some funk chords. Would be ok for House-type stuff.

The synths, voxes, and pads are really nice. I wasnt expecting so many, and they are good quality. There are a couple choir patches that sound better than anything else in the P2k soundset IMO. The string patches are nice too.

It's a rom, so unless you take it out and kick it around on the floor, it's not gonna break. I've owned 7 Emu roms and none of them have messed up on me ever.

Emu is generally very helpful, but since they don't sell their hardware products anymore they are getting a little crappy in this area.

Overall, I'd say if you want some great sounds that go beyond the normal drum kits, Beat Garden is your rom. Especially if you need some sounds for DnB, Jungle, or Industrial. I would definitely use the basses and vox/choirs on this over the other roms.

Beat Garden was done by Rob Papen, and was programmed very well. You can hear some mp3 demos of the Beat Garden presets on his website.