E-MU Morpheus Z-Plane filter experimentation .mp3s

This is my first experimentation with Morpheus.

For now, there are only examples to show how Z-Plane works, but I'll add more deeper material.

http://deepsynthesis.net

It's a great synth for transforming a patch that sounds like an instrument into something that sounds like vocals. Unfortunately it suffers from crappy EMU samples so a lot of sounds, especially the drums sound like {censored}.

I'm not sure why you would relate the CS6x(or motif) to a morpheus, after having both for several years there is absolutely nothing in their filters that they have in common.

Sealed, thanks for posting this. I'll look forward to checking out your sounds as soon as I have time. I bought a used Morpheus a while ago and was disappointed in the preset sounds. I usually very into programming my synths, but this one seemed less user friendly and I never really got into it very deeply. I've often thought of selling it but I know that there is a lot of potential that lurks beneath the surface.

Also, I know this is a bit off topic, but while I have your attention, I'd like to see if I could get your expert advice on this - I have an opportunity to pick up an Ensoniq MR rack in a trade and was wondering what you thought of these? I know it has the "transwave" sounds like the Fizmo that everyone raves about. Do you have any thoughts on the MR, especially in regard to sounds for ambient ethereal soundscapes? I don't mean to hijack the thread, but if you have any feedback I'd appreciate it.

For now, I only tried using saw wave only. There are not-so-interesting samples as well, but I'll see what other waveforms can do.

Yes, YAMAHA is very remotely related to Z-Plane. Z-Plane is a chain of 7 filters, and YAMAHA uses 2-filter chains. Using this chain, over 20 filter characters are available in MOTIF. This idea of chaining filters with different characters with a simplified parameter are common to both.

Thank you, Karma1. The factory demo song is not very Z-Plane oriented, and E-MU seems to have liked to show its Rompler side - it was made in 1994, when most companies dropped interesting synthesis and tried only to increase the PCM ROM size.

Morpheus is not very user-friendly, but there's a freeware editor to help you experiment. I'm making an adaptation for Emagic SoundDiver.

I'm interested in Ensoniq MR, too. MR uses '2nd-Generation Transwaves' like FIZMO, and not the 1st-generation ones of VFX etc. Though the waveforms are different between MR and FIZMO, MR sounds smoother and much more hi-fi than the older VFX, etc.

Judging from MR's demo songs, I think it's a decent rompler as well. Together with Transwaves, it would be possible to make good ambient soundscapes with MR.

But note that MR does not have the resonant filter of FIZMO. Also I think older Ensoniqs like VFX sounds more powerful than the newer ones like FIZMO, despite its noises. The voice architecture of FIZMO and MR is rather simplified than VFX, TS-10, etc.

None of the morpheus's filters use 7 chained, some filters use 8, some use 4. A cube has 8 points, not 7. I think you could claim they have more in common by calling them both romplers, there are loads of synths that have a pair of chained filters. Morpheus essentially uses simplified 3d filters, while something like the motif is 1d.

Editor is here http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~pwhite/morpheus.htm It's clunky and dated but it works.

I have an MR rack. Excellent rompler. You need the software librarian to programme it though - you can't do much programming on the rack itself. Use of transwaves was scaled back from the TS series, though there are some very fine sounds on the MRC-1 card that show off the transwave stuff, if you can find one. I would think you'd be disappointed in the MR rack's capacity for soundscapes due to these limitations.

MR sucks. I bought one (non-expanded) it's just a GM on steroids, nothing interesting in it... then I sold it and bought another one with Urban board (since every one raves about them), hoping it would improve the soundset. I never got the idea of that piece of {censored}. Just a load of LQ bland synthetic crap on that board... It does have a pretty full sound, but very boring.

3/10

Yes, my free association about MOTIF may have went too far.... I'm just interested in its various filter types, controlled by 3 parameters - frequency, resonance and distance.

The Morpheus filter is in fact made of 7 chains. I added some pics from the manual and descriptions on my Morpheus page.

This complex combination is controlled by 3 parameters like this.

More correctly, 8 complex filter states made of 7 filter chain.

More correctly would be 8 or 4 filters each made of 1 filter and 6 parametric EQ's. I suppose if you call parametric EQ's filters your closer but most people don't call parametric EQ's filters, they call them EQ's.

Personally I think EMU claiming 197 filters is really exagerating and marketting as a lot of them are really nothing more than a simple effect combined with a filter crossfade.

The main reason I keep it is that its really easy to get a certain type of sound from compared to spending a lot of programming time on another rompler and sometimes that {censored}ty emu sample sound is desirable.

Sealed, (also nicain and Goo) thanks very much for the informative responces. Much appreciated.

Yes, exactly.

As to the terminology - PEQ are bandpass/band-reject filters, especially when the parameters are controlled in real time.

I suppose Morpheus and UltraProteus were the experiment station for E-MU. They experimentally made 197 or 288 filters, and selected useful ones for later models. I myself chose ones interesting for me and uploaded them on my site.

It could have been good if users could edit all 20 parameters of the Z-Plane - that is, to create our own filter types.