The Orbit is ideal for dance music (disco, ambient, house, techno, but nothing too hard core). Don't expect to find ordinary string or piano patches in here. You will need other modules to complement the stuff that the Orbit is good at. It's fairly easy and straightforward to program and comes with lots of presets that already sound well, though most of you will want to create your own patches with the 512 internal sounds and find it very easy to outperform the presets. (And thank God and E-MU for that DATA WHEEL, I really miss it on my Korg X5DR)

I heard someone complain about the filters being a bit weak. That may be true except for the high and the low pass filters (which you'll be using most of the time) You can have 'em squeking in overdrive, and since they can be easily tweaked by an extra envelope generator or any of 2 LFO's (or all 3 of em), it allows for lots of cool stuff. Also you can use note position or velocity to influence the filter cutoff or Q factor (or both), but also influence all the parameters of the LFo's and the envelopes of the patches.

In fact it's many routing possibilities of sound parameters makes up for obvious lack of real time control that you would have to face in a module. It's really flexible and programmable.

Fun machine in all! Some draw backs: Either I don't understand Beats Mode or it is in fact not very good. E-MU may have improved on the concept in later modules. For some parameters the ranges of 0-127 or 0-255 seem to coarse. Attack of the envelopes obviously being one of them.

I bought it for something like $380, which is probably about rite.

I think the combination of AN-1x strings plus Orbits pads will get me some great soundscape stuff for drum and bass backgrounds. If not, I'll sell it.