DREW KRAG: Hey guys. This is Drew Krag with Gearwire.Com for another home workshop. Today we're in the studio we're in the studio with the E-MU Proteus 1000, and it's basically a MIDI module, and if you're not familiar with MIDI modules or otherwise know as sound modules or sound boxes, it's basically like an outboard piece of hardware that you'd rack mount and you can control it via MIDI with a MIDI controller or your computer and it basically generates sound. You'll have a bunch of keyboard sounds, organ, drums, really just about anything you'd find in any like regular keyboard. It's essentially the element of the keyboard that creates the sound. We have it right over here so let's take a look at the E-MU Proteus 1000.

Now here you have it, the E-MU Proteus 1000. We're going to start by just looking at the display here in the center. Now let me point out this little blinking LED here. This is your cursor. You can control the cursor with these two buttons right here. This would take you right and this will take you left. Now, as you notice, we basically have a pretty standard MIDI setup here. We got the MIDI channel as first, so right now we're on channel 6. We have volume, which is 127; that's the maximum MIDI volume. All MIDI parameters are from 0 to 127. Pan as well so left to right. We have this as user which indicates that this preset is a user preset which will allow us to save it. Over here we have the preset number which is all the way zero. KB1 stands for "Keyboard 1" which is more of a genre of the style of sound you're looking for, so if you want other keyboards you can take your cursor to this -- or actually, I'm sorry, if you want a different type of keyboard, you take your cursor to this so you have keyboard 2, keyboard 3, keyboard 4, a kit for drum kits sounds, all sorts of different like genres of sound. And then let's say we want a keyboard, we just want a different sound, hit cursor to the right and you can change through the different types of grand pianos and keyboard sounds.

So the other cool thing about this right off the bat is this audition button right here. Now this is kind of cool. This unit has MIDI information stored inside of it unique for every sound. It's got MIDI information for every single sound which means when you push this button...

[DREW KRAG PRESSES BUTTON TO AUDITION SOUND ON THE E-MU PROTEUS 1000]

...it basically gives you an audition of the sound. So as I go through the different parameters, you know, it's kind of cheesy but you get various different auditions. Okay, we're going to turn that off now but that's a quick way to audition sounds if you don't have any MIDI data going through the unit yet. So that's how you can navigate through the unit using the cursor buttons. Obviously, if you want to change your parameter, this large knob will let you do that. Anywhere you move the cursor, this large knob will control the parameter.

Now if we look over to the left, this is the really fun side of it. Let me get a decent audition going here.

[DREW KRAG PRESSES BUTTON TO AUDITION SOUND ON THE E-MU PROTEUS 1000]

If we move on to the left, we have all of our effects and filters, and they're all laid out basically using this chart up here. There's three different banks that these knobs can control. The first bank, this knob would be the tone, presence, shape, image. When you hit this button, it goes to the next bank, and now this is attack, decay, movement, rate, and then if you push it again, we have two dynamic buttons which should be like compression of some kind, effect A and effect B, so you can control all these parameters with just these four knobs, and this fifth knob over here is your master volume. So, right off the bat I'm going to audition that keyboard sound.

[DREW KRAG PRESSES BUTTON TO AUDITION SOUND ON THE E-MU PROTEUS 1000 AND TWEAKS THE TONE KNOB]

I'm changing the tone, which is like a filter.

[DREW KRAG PRESSES BUTTON TO AUDITION SOUND ON THE E-MU PROTEUS 1000 AND TWEAKS THE PRESENCE KNOB]

This will change the presence, which is also kind of like the resonance of the filter.

[DREW KRAG PRESSES BUTTON TO AUDITION SOUND ON THE E-MU PROTEUS 1000 AND TWEAKS THE SHAPE KNOB]

We got the shape.

[DREW KRAG PRESSES BUTTON TO AUDITION SOUND ON THE E-MU PROTEUS 1000 AND TWEAKS VARIOUS KNOB]

I'm going to turn a few of these down.

[DREW KRAG PRESSES BUTTON TO AUDITION SOUND ON THE E-MU PROTEUS 1000 AND TWEAKS VARIOUS KNOB]

So, really easy to tweak the parameters of these unit just by turning these knobs, and we're going to do that we a couple of tracks that we have here on the next segment.