LARRY NELSON: The Proteus X is a virtual synth for the PC. It comes with our 0404 interface card. It gives your four ins, four outs, hardware accelerated effects with the PatchMix software, and it just works great, and that's only $149 with the sound card. You do need to have the sound card in the machine to use the Proteus X software.

This Proteus comes with 2,000 sounds so right off the bat you're just loaded up with great sounds. Today, I'll kind of take you through what it looks like, how it works, and I'll give you a feel for the whole thing.

Starting from the left hand side of your screen, we have the way to load sounds and the way to get around. You can either load sounds. Down here at the bottom it says system, or from the library so you can look through your PC, look in My Music, look in whatever folder you've created, and load your sounds that way. You can go to our little app, which is a library, which is where your sounds will automatically kind of default and go to and so you can save sounds to that library, load more sounds into that library, and load from the library.

At any given time, you can load what E-MU calls a bank of sounds, and a bank of sounds is a collection of many, many presets. A preset is a thing you play, a piano, a flute. Some people call them patches; we call them presets. So, at any point, you can load a collection of presets, which is a bank. You can load an individual preset, a finished thing that you play, or you can load, at any point, any given raw sample to create your own presets so it's very, very flexible that way.

If we look at the main screen, we have a real nice, bit, easy-to-read presets screen here. This tells me that the Dynamic Grand is piano, is the sound that is currently active, it's preset number 000, on MIDI channel number 1, and there's bank and program numbers here as well. Keyboard 1 is the category that it lives in because we do have categories and you can search and save by category as well as by individual instrument.

Down below we have our volume and pan controls and these will certainly respond and allow you to see what is going on with your controller. If you're using the E-MU Xboard 25 and you move, you change volume on it, this will reflect your change, or if you change pan that will reflect your change. This shows us the output, in this case that's ASIO out 3 and 4, you can set that to taste. We have also aux and effects per preset. These effects are different than the PatchMix effects, and we'll look at those in a minute. You can actually have CPU intensive effects as well as the PatchMix effects.

One question is, "Well, are these from the chip?" No. These are not from the chip. These are kind of like everybody else's effects as far as they are CPU intensive, but the fact that you can have them there and integrate them into the sound is just another way to program.

Down here at the bottom, you see 16 realtime controller knobs. If you're using the Xboard 25 or 49 and you dial controller A, it will move this and affect maybe the filter opening and closing. We call it in this default setting tone. We also have presence, shape, image. These can be programmed to be any MIDI continuous controller number that you want them to be, so you can use either our defaults or you can go ahead and program your own. In the bottom, we have a keyboard so you can certainly audition sounds and play from here, although, you know, it's certainly much quicker and easier to use your MIDI controller keyboard.

Over here and a real interesting one, E-MU is really well known for our filter technology. We have patents on filtering technology. We have 2-, 4-, 6-, and 12-pole filters. The 12-pole filter will actually give you 72 dB of cut. This filter override allows you to quickly add any of our 50 filter types to this particular sound and change it immediately. It's just a real quick and dirty way to go ahead and do some real fast programming and really tweak your sound, and it's a real, real fast and nice way to do things so that's just a little simple way to get it some very creative programming. You have your main mix, your volume, you have your aux outputs, you have your tempo if it's synchronized to something beats per minute, tuning and transposing controls as well. So this is all here.

If we look real quickly up in the corner, remember, if you saw the PatchMix effects discussion, this is very similar to that. I can choose an effect, maybe I choose a flanger for this, it shows me the parameters. I can certainly tweak and edit these parameters as well, and then this will save with the preset. I can do this on my effects. I can have an effect A, effects B, and I can also have aux effects.

So this is real quick look at the front panel, and the last thing on the front panel that we want to look at is this can be a 32 MIDI channel machine as a standalone instrument. There's MIDI channels 1 through 16, there's MIDI channels 17 through 32. As a VST plugin, it can be 16 instruments which is also very, very powerful.

This is real quick. Per MIDI channel, it gives me the name of the instrument, the MIDI channel, volume, and pan position, so I can go and change the sound any time I want simply by clicking on the little button right next through the name, and I can look through the entire selection of sounds that I've loaded into the Proteus. I can search these by name, I can search these by bank and program number, I can look at it by category, so that's real handy.

If I want to go look at basses, I know that, you know, acoustic basses are in Bass 1, so I simply find Bass 1. And whenever I highlight this without loading it, I can play it and I will hear whatever instrument I have selected. I can go to any category or any sound and once I find the one I like, I say OK, and it's now on MIDI channel 1. I've replaced the Dynamic Grand with this sound. So, I can go and quickly play these, audition them, and say, "Yeah, that's the one I want," and load it. So have channels 1 through 16 and channels 17 through 32.

Okay, once I have selected my sounds and I want to edit something, if I clicked down here at the bottom where we looked at library, system, and sampler, if I select the sampler; I can go to any preset, and this is where my editing comes in. I can now edit my voices in zones. This allows me to set a range for my instrument as well as set the instrument itself whether it is a multisample just a raw sample.

I can also set up links which connects two presets together for a layered sound, and then the really fun page is the voice processing page. So your customer will have all these parameters in which to edit and do whatever they want to as far as programming their own sounds, and we certainly -- again, we have the filters that we saw earlier and we can select these and we can also tweak them and edit them to taste. Once I find, maybe I love this filter setting, I can save that as a template so I never have to create it again. I can save the LFOs as a template and never have to create it again. That comes in real handy because you have 36 realtime and continuous controllers you can program per sample so it can get really intense.

A real good one to save as a template is the chords pages because you have so many parameters you don't want to be that programming that all the time, so we do have a fully programmable 32-channel, really good sounding virtual synth. It's the Proteus X, it's only $149, and it comes with a couple of thousand sounds in the library.