DREW KRAG: Hey guys. Here's the setup. We've got Ableton Live, and I recorded a little MIDI track in there. We're going to send it to the Proteus through my sound card and then the Proteus is run back into my sound card so that we can hear what's going on. First, let just introduce you to the other sounds that are in the track. So for starters, we have some guitar.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS BACK GUITAR TRACK]

If you're wondering, this is the Larrivee. I did a demo of this a few weeks ago. You can check it out on Gearwire.

We also have some drums.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS BACK DRUM TRACK]

These drum sounds are actually EZdrummer. We also did a video of that plugin. We have some harp...

[DREW KRAG PLAYS BACK HARP TRACK]

...which was actually recorded over here. We do have a harp over here, we'll do a video of that someday, and I put some delay on it that's why it sounds kind of funny, and last but not least...,

[DREW KRAG PLAYS BACK PIANO TRACK]

...this is the piano part that's actually being played by the Proteus. Now notice it's the same exact part as the harp part. I just doubled it, but when you put them together they sound kind of cool, but I'm looking for the right piano sound so we're going to go through and we're going to audition a few piano sounds in the Proteus and pick out the one that seems to work the best.

So here's how I set this up. I basically line up the first five MIDI channels with various different pianos that were striking my interest, so we're going to go through each one quickly and just kind of take a listen. Now, some of them are pretty cool sounding, some of them are not, but we're going to basically tweak each one to sound as best as possible.

So let's just take a listen to the first one. It's just the concert grand piano.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS BACK PROJECT]

So you can hear that I turned it up just a little bit so we can hear the piano really well. Now, first thing I'm going to do is I'm jumping down to effects A and effects B, put a little reverb on there. Let's see what effects B is.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS TURNS UP EFECTS B]

Ooh, delay. So, I don't want to have too much delay, saturation, and wetness to this so I'm going to turn that down a little bit. Now, I want to mess around with the tone and the presence or the filter, in other words itself, get a little bit of presence, tweak the filter a little bit.

So that's kind of a cool sound. To be honest with you, a grand piano is they almost sound best just clean, but we're going to move on to the next sound. This one's on channel 2. This is a classic EP, so let's tweak some of the sounds on this one. First of all effect A and that's kind of subtle. I think it is reverb. Well, with this one, I'm most interested in a little filter action. This sound might be kind of good if we automate the filter a little bit but let's move on.

Next sound's on channel 3. It's called "Electre 2", give it a little reverb, a little filter delay, a little filter action. That's kind of a cool sound. Let's check the next one. You know actually I love this one.

[DREW KRAG SWITCHES OVER TO CHANNEL 4 ON E-MU PROTEUS 1000]

[LAUGHS] Yeah. Cheesy, right? But check this out, right over here.

[DREW KRAG TWEAKS FILTER AND PRESENCE KNOBS]

Put a little filter on it, put a delay and some reverb.

[DREW KRAG TWEAKS VARIOUS PARAMETER KNOBS]

Almost sounds like more an arpeggiator now. So all in all, an incredibly versatile unit. Let's try the last channel.

[DREW KRAG PLAYS CHANNEL 4 ON E-MU PROTEUS 1000.]

Some vibes. I love the sound of vibes. Now these are a little hard, so let's try a little more bird and a little filter. I actually really enjoy the sound of some vibes with a filter on it so I'm going to stick with that sound.

Now, an option I will always have is recording this sound into my computer and sweeten the sound that way but I might not be pretty satisfied with the way this sounds. Let's just hear this and the harp part together.

[DREW KRAG SOLOS AND AUDITIONS HARP AND VIBRAPHONE PARTS IN PROJECT]

That sounds like a great texture, something I'd use. So again, this is the E-MU Proteus 1000 30th Anniversary rack-mount MIDI module. Thanks for watching Gearwire.