Emu's Vintage Keys expander made available a wide range of classic keyboard sounds in a handy rackmount unit, and it found a loving home in many pro studios. Now everyone can enjoy the keyboard sounds of yesteryear with the Classic Keys. Nigel Lord investigates...

A couple of months ago, I received a phone call from a friend who manages a local studio, desparate to borrow my Vintage Keys module. Their machine had apparently been on long-term loan from someone who had decided it had been quite long enough, and there wasn't a replacement to be had in the entire city of Leeds.

Arriving at the studio, I found them unable to complete an important session for want of a handful of Vintage Keys sounds – and just beginning to realise how dependent they had become on this innocuous 1U rackmount module. Other synths and sound modules came and went without anyone noticing much, but Vintage Keys had been in constant use since its arrival some eighteen months before. There aren't many recent synths you could say that about.

With so-called classic analogue equipment showing no sign of losing its appeal or falling in price, and more and more people searching their attics and cellars for the discarded technology of yesteryear, the appeal of Vintage Keys isn't hard to understand. For about the same price as a second-hand 303 and a dodgy Siel monosynth, you can be it with an ARP 2600, a Mellotron, a clutch of Jupiters, plus Oberheims, Moogs, Hammonds – you name it. With an expanded Vintage Keys (see this month's review in Toolbox), you have some 435 separate samples at your disposal, and plenty of RAM to get them sounding how you want. If you're at all interested in analogue keyboards it's a real bargain.

Of course, if you don't happen to have the necessary £1,000+, it's a real bummer.

But help is at hand. E-mu have just decided to throw the aspirant-but-impoverished Vintage Keys owner a lifeline. Enter Classic Keys – the vintage keys module for those who can't afford Vintage Keys. Perhaps...

Clean sweeps

First things first: How much of the original machine has survived in this streamlined edition? Well, the most obvious casualties are the secondary output pair and the onboard filters which, while digital, were your passport to real time control of those essential filter sweeps. Classic Keys does have filters – simple low-pass tone controls which can be accessed via a connected keyboard (not, strangely, as part of the onboard programming system) – but these are restricted to providing velocity-sensitive filtering and keyboard filter scaling – varying the brightness of a sound as you move up and down the keyboard.

For the most part, filtered effects are limited to those captured as part of the original samples. This perhaps won't trouble the purists who object to the very idea of digital filters, but for the rest of us it's a significant loss and contributes in some way to making this feel more like a sound module than a programmable synth.

This is perhaps a little unfair, as there is still much to engage the dedicated programmer – not least of which is an effects section with two separate processors that can be used independently or serially. Again, we're talking digital processing here — those who envisaged some kind of elaborate internal recreation of a Space Echo may be disappointed. Me, I couldn't give a damn. I'm prepared to believe in the magic of old analogue synths, but tape-chomping old echo devices were just bad news — even if they were finished in a fetching shade of green.

Of course, owners of Vintage Keys modules are entitled to pose a couple of pertinent questions here. Like, how come they have to do without any onboard effects processor whilst those Johnny-come-lately Classic Keys owners spend less and get two to play with.

If it's any comfort to them, the effects are only available globally, so there will be the usual compromises if you're working in multitimbral mode. But the design logic is still a little difficult to fathom; I can only assume it represents E-mu's attempt to make Classic Keys one of those all-singing, all-dancing modules capable of doing a bit of everything.

This is certainly reflected in their choice of sampled sounds which, in addition to the classic analogue stuff includes brass instruments such as trumpets, saxes and trombones, acoustic and electric guitars plus drum and percussion instruments. Not a problem, you might think, and handy to have all your 808 and 909 samples included in the Classic Keys package. But that's not what you're getting. These aren't synth-derived sounds but the real thing: Real drums, real brass, real guitars.

Note of discord

Now it seems to me that one of the things that gave many of the classic analogue machines their character was their often hopeless attempts at recreating the sound of real, acoustic instruments. A TR808, for example, sounds absolutely nothing like a real drum kit, but that was its charm. So why on earth pair vintage analogue keyboard sounds with samples of natural acoustic instruments? It makes no sense at all.

This isn't to question the quality of the onboard presets – many of which use these sounds to good effect – but to someone looking to maximise their investment in analogue technology by buying a single sample-based synth module, it's going to be very difficult to explain.

Inexplicable or not, you're given a total of 8Mb worth of sample memory to work with, shared between some 249 instruments. These are allocated to 512 preset memories divided equally between ROM and RAM, each carrying a full complement of sounds fresh from the factory – so you'll need to save the RAM presets (or at least, those you want to keep) if you intend programming your own.

For reasons best known to E-mu – and I can't believe they were unable to get hold of the original machines – all the sounds are culled from the extensive Emulator III library, not recorded specially for Classic Keys.

On the other hand, the sampling certainly lives up to Emulator standards. Like Vintage Keys before it, this is a very clean, quiet module. Don't worry, the original analogue sounds are still there in all their raspy, grungy glory – it's just that there's no irritating digital noise to obscure that lovely warm analogue noise.

In case you're not familiar with this kind of module, perhaps I should explain that the samples replace the oscillators in conventional synths, but are treated in the normal way through a menu-driven programming section. Each preset can be assembled from primary and secondary samples and independently programmed for key range, volume, pan, fine and coarse tuning, delay and sound start (which determines where in a sample playback begins).

In addition, it's possible to individually assign both primary and secondary instruments to the internal chorus processor, to reverse them, and to play them in solo mode, aping the action of the old monosynths by preventing retriggering by a new note while an existing note is being held down (it also prevents you from playing chords).

Fade away and radiate

The inclusion of both primary and secondary sample sources for each preset may have alerted you to the possibility of also setting up crossfades; taking you smoothly from one sound to another at a rate determined by an onboard LFO – or any real-time control source such as velocity, modulation or pitch bend. There are parameter adjustments for amount, direction, balance and also switch point, if you prefer cross switching to cross fade.

Speaking of LFOs, there are actually two of these — and pretty sophisticated they are too, with triangle, sawtooth, sine, square and random waveforms. As you would imagine they're adjustable for rate and depth, but an additional setting makes it possible to randomly vary the frequency with each key press. This is useful in creating more realistic ensemble effects, where each note played has a slightly different modulation rate.

Also contributing to realism, the LFO delay parameter allows you to set up a delay between the playing of a note and the onset of modulation, just as musicians apply vibrato on real instruments.

The envelope shapers – one for each instrument sample – include a hold time parameter in addition to usual attack, decay, sustain and release controls. Of course, you may be wondering what happens to a sample's original amplitude envelope when a new envelope is programmed here: The simple answer is that it's overridden – or it is after you've switched on the alternate envelope function.

A third, auxiliary envelope is also included in Classic Keys, this time with an additional delay parameter ahead of the attack/hold section. In contrast to the main envelopes, the auxiliary envelope is intended to be routed to any of the 24 realtime control destinations along with up to four MIDI control devices, pitch wheel, mono and poly pressure and both LFOs.

It's important to make the distinction between real-time modulation and keyboard/velocity modulation and understand how each works; between them they contribute significantly to Classic Keys' playability. This is important on all synths, of course, but given that the purpose of Classic Keys is to recreate the sound of instruments whose most distinguishing feature was their controllability, it is clearly essential.

Classic Keys' user interface closely follows E-mu's tried and tested programming system used on all the Proteus models and Vintage Keys. It is, quite simply, the system by which all other multi-timbral modules should be judged. Laughably easy to use, it makes you seriously question the kind of fiends employed by other manufacturers whose sole aim is to confuse the hell out of anyone who dares access two or more parts at once. It's even more annoying that having been around for quite a few years now, the E-mu system still isn't adopted by other manufacturers, normally only too happy to add a few extra pages of incomprehensible technobabble to the instruction manual.

Applications

Describing the sound of an instrument like Classic Keys is fraught with difficulties. After all, sampling quality aside, what you're actually listening to is the sound of other instruments: Does the ARP 2600 sound any good? Does the Minimoog cut the mustard? You see my point...

More often than not, what you end up talking about are the presets, which good or bad, can hardly be said to represent the last word on a synth's performance. If they did, where would the original DX7 be? – certainly not included here. The fact is, Classic Keys is designed to be programmed, tweaked, controlled in real time and generally messed around with till you're happy. In this sense, one has to admire the choice of classic keyboard samples that have been included. Had I not heard Vintage Keys and now Classic Keys, I would have been prepared to say it simply wasn't possible to take brief snippets of sound and stitch them together into an accurate recreation of many of the world's best known (and best loved) keyboard instruments. E-mu proved it was possible with Vintage Keys, and they reaffirm it here.

However, it is impossible to examine Classic Keys and not be aware of several quite serious shortcomings, not the least of which is the filling up of precious ROM space with wholly irrelevant sounds such as acoustic drums, common or garden electric basses, 12-string guitars, trombones, trumpets – the list goes on. Remember, this is a machine that has 'Classic Keys – Analog Keyboards' emblazoned across its front panel.

Whilst it might be unreasonable to expect analogue sounds not included on Vintage Keys, the limited range of classic keyboards which go to make up Classic Keys is a disappointment. It wouldn't be a problem if there was a slot for extra ROM: in fact I would have been happy to have had less onboard ROM in exchange for this facility. The Proteus EX already serves as a good all-rounder, and one has to question E-mu's judgment in coveting that role: Classic Keys would have been better off as a cheap source of all things analogue.

This also leads us back to the introduction of effects at (presumably) the expense of filters. While approving in principle the inclusion of effects on all synth modules, I can't help thinking that most users already have, or are likely to buy, an external effects processor which could do the same job. What they don't have is access to resonant filters with which to treat samples – the filters which for many, are what analogue sounds are all about. I'm afraid if I had to make a choice between effects processing and filters on a machine such as this, it would have to be for the filters.

Verdict

It has to be said that if I had to make a choice between Classic Keys now, or waiting a while and saving up the necessary dosh for Vintage Keys, I would opt for the latter. Perhaps I was just deceived by the title, but in Classic Keys I was expecting simply a scaled-down version of its elder brother. In reality it's an excellent all-round machine with a heavy emphasis towards classic analogue keyboards, but enough other stuff to make it more broadly appealing.

Thinking about it, this probably reveals E-mu's greater knowledge of marketing than mine. If you are drawn to the idea of classic analogue keyboards, but are looking for a synth that will provide you with everything you need to be up and running and producing your own music, Classic Keys is pretty spot-on.