E-MU Mo' Phatt Urban Dance Synth

May 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Gary Eskow

Although it is technically inaccurate to suggest that the architecture wrapped inside E-mu's new Mo' Phatt Urban Dance Synth is the product of some freakishly intelligent mutant alien, sometimes it feels that deep and otherworldly. Sure, you can use the Mo' Phatt — the hip-hop installment of E-mu's continuing line of Proteus 2000 sample/synthesizer playback units — as a straight-ahead MIDI device. And certainly most users (especially those familiar with Planet Phatt, an earlier E-mu sound source) will likely buy the Mo' Phatt for its excellent-sounding presets. But also locked inside this box are hundreds of musical patterns from some very talented players. If anything, the most difficult challenge the Mo' Phatt presents is how to incorporate its impressive riffs and patterns without surrendering your own musicality.

The Mo' Phatt is a single-space, rack-mountable unit with standard MIDI In, Out, and Thru connections. Although many project studio musicians neglect to hook up a MIDI Out from devices like the Mo' Phatt to their MIDI patch bay, this connection is critical if you plan on extracting the box's full potential. The Mo' Phatt ships with 512 user presets and 32 MB of sound memory that you can expand to 64 MB with optional SIMMs for a maximum of 1,024 presets. Some of the unit's 16-bit samples — particularly pads and synths — suffer in comparison to soft synths and other newer devices that use 24-bit samples. However, in the hip-hop world that the Mo' Phatt is geared toward, 16-bit samples are still the norm. All of the sounds are well recorded and will integrate nicely into both live and studio applications.

FRONT AND CENTER

The Mo' Phatt's front panel houses a small LED screen, five knobs on the left side (a volume control and four real-time controllers), and eight buttons and a scrolling wheel on the right side. The tiny screen is the Mo' Phatt's greatest limitation: you often have to scroll through more than 20 pages to get to the parameter you're looking for when editing a sound. Fortunately, E-mu incorporated the Sound Navigator feature found on other Proteus units to help users become familiar with the sounds.

To get started, all you really need to look for is the bottom line of the LED. The Mo' Phatt's entire sound set is divided into categories, which include bts (beats), gtr (guitars), and 15 other groupings. The “<” and “>” buttons located on the unit's upper right corner let you quickly navigate to a sound category, choose a sound, and then scroll to the preset field to select an individual sound.

Once you have become familiar with the sounds, getting up and running with the Mo' Phatt is simple. The unit's real-time controllers, which are particularly helpful when used with the Beats Busy mode, are aimed primarily at DJs and stage musicians. Modifiable factory routings for these four controllers are laid out in three layers, access to which is gained using a button located on the Mo' Phatt's upper left side. A quick examination of the silk-screened front panel reveals how these controllers are set up at the factory. By grabbing knobs when any of the three layers is selected, you can quickly alter frequency cutoff, frequency resonance, and other common processing parameters.

MANUAL TRANSMISSION

The third real-time control layer, WILD 1-4, lets you modify the material being played either in Audition mode — in which previously selected riffs containing up to 16 parts are played — or in Beats Busy mode. You can alter the number of parts as well as their pitch.

I wanted to learn more about the WILD function, though, and when I found that it wasn't covered in the printed Getting Started manual that ships with the Mo' Phatt, I opened up the PDF version of the full manual. Unfortunately, I didn't find any WILD listing in the index, and executing a search for this word didn't lead me to an explanation of the functions that these knobs perform. I also came across some clumsy and misleading instructions, such as those dealing with the Master Arpeggiator. Step two (of four) clearly tells the user to advance the cursor to the bottom line of the display and then, in step three, to scroll to the Master Arpeggiator page. In fact, you must leave the cursor on the top line of the display and advance 12 steps into the edit process to access the Master Arpeggiator functions. I feel that if you're going to force a user to rely on a PDF manual, it had better be spot-on.

ARPEGGIO TO GO

Most of my misgivings about the manual vanished when I dug into the Mo' Phatt's very cool arpeggiator functions. Each preset comes with an associated arpeggiator, and you can have as many as 16 arpeggiators playing in sync at one time. Some of the patterns are extremely complex and sound as if someone spent considerable time and effort to program them. You can also create your own arpeggios from scratch and store them as user presets. The arpeggiator transmits notes through MIDI, making it easy to record the performances in a sequencer and edit them to create your own custom tracks. You can easily do the same thing with bass lines and other material, including drum kit parts. This process is a great creative inspiration for getting out of those ruts we all get into from time to time. Working with the Mo' Phatt in this way lets you tap the talent of many excellent programmers and, in essence, collaborate with them.

Another plus: E-mu has programmed the Mo' Phatt so its triggered beats lock incredibly well with the arpeggio patterns. You can very easily take a handful of sounds and experiment with different arpeggios until you find a blend that works. It's also possible to choose a single arpeggio pattern as a master pattern and program the other parts to follow it.

With 16 individual parts and 64-note polyphony, the Mo' Phatt offers excellent multitimbral possibilities for creating songs in the studio. However, you will need to change some factory settings when you're using the unit as a multitimbral playback module. If you don't change the Beats Channel and Trigger Channel to MIDI channel 1 in the Arp/Beats screen, you might run into a problem. When you switch to another MIDI channel to look for a synth sound while a beat plays on channel 1, you'll lose the performance being played on channel 1 because the device automatically defaults to playing beats on the currently selected MIDI channel. (The manual could have explained this more clearly.)

LIVE AT LAST

The Mo' Phatt's Latch feature, which ensures that any triggered loop plays in time, makes it easy to play loops live. In Latch mode you can assign several keys to turn individual loops on and off. Even if you trigger a loop too early, it will not play out of time — it waits until the next downbeat to begin playing the loop you've selected. You can assign various drum and percussion loops to the lower octaves of your keyboard, a bass patch in the middle, and a synth patch to the upper octaves, and you can trigger patterns with a simple touch from your left hand between bass line notes.

The Mo' Phatt's “patch cord” design, which is incorporated into all of E-mu's Proteus 2000-series modules, offers versatile programming capabilities similar to those of traditional modular analog signal routing where physical cords connect different modules together. The Mo' Phatt's virtual patch-cord programming feature provides a greater range of sound-creation possibilities than most users are ever likely to tap. You can use patch cords to modify individual preset layers (up to four layers are available for each preset), to affect a complete patch, or to change the way that beats and arpeggios are controlled.

For example, I wanted to assign the pitch wheel to control the tempo of a beat. To do this, I went into the Arps/Beats editor, scrolled to the Riff Tempo page, and instructed the Mo' Phatt to use the current tempo. I then entered the Master screen and scrolled to the Tempo Controller page, where I assigned Controller 1 to the pitch wheel. This connection ensured that the pitch wheel would modulate the Tempo Controller, which was being keyed from the current tempo. At that point, I simply needed to make sure that I set the MIDI channel on my keyboard to the same channel as the beats pattern.

PHATT IS PHAT

My only real gripe with the Mo' Phatt is its incomplete documentation. There are no tutorials to take users through editing procedures. If you really want to explore the exciting potential existing within this box beyond using it as a sound source or arpeggiator, you're on your own. But even at its most basic level, the Mo' Phatt is still a powerful creative tool. Loaded with tons of useful, inventive sounds for hip-hop and R&B, the Mo' Phatt will keep your music-making juices flowing for a long time.

Gary Eskow is a New Jersey-based composer and producer. He is currently working on an album of smooth jazz with alto saxophone player Baron Raymonde.

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