After the chaos of the Film Score expansion and the sweaty, chemically altered lunacy of Dance Rage, it seems E-MU’s upper management finally stepped into the studio and demanded a product that could safely be sold to a wedding band. E-MU gave us the Song Writer ROM card, the sonic equivalent of a sensible beige Volvo.

This was the card you bought when you realized you couldn’t actually pay your rent by making three-hour ambient Z-plane soundscapes and needed to write a jingle for a local mattress commercial. But even when trying to play it straight, E-MU’s sound designers couldn’t completely hide their quirks.

Let’s look at what happened when the Morpheus team was forced to wear a tie and get a real job:

You want standard keyboards? You got ’em. But they still managed to sneak in excellent puns like 023. Kbd:BeeFree (for the Hammond B3 lovers) alongside workhorses like 011. Kbd:KicknClv and 018. Kbd:B3Lesley. Perfect for covering Steely Dan at a Tuesday night open mic.

Realizing they needed to appeal to the modern 90s hitmaker, E-MU gave us 005. Bas:HippHopp. Nothing says authentic street cred quite like a heavily stylized, misspelled preset on a $1,000 rackmount synthesizer.

What is it with E-MU and meat-based bass patches? We’ve seen “RawMeat” before, and here we are blessed with 081. Bas:AllMeat. Because sometimes your ballad just needs a little extra cholesterol in the low end.

The sound designers clearly got bored by the time they hit the Sound Effects category. Instead of standard wind chimes, we get 113. Sfx:RaptorX (someone clearly watched Jurassic Park on their lunch break) and the thrillingly domestic 115. Sfx:Sprinklr.

It’s hard to make fun of patches like 031. Ens:Strings, 078. Bas:UprtElec, and 100. Gtr:Acou. They are just sturdy, reliable, and completely devoid of the usual E-MU insanity.

While it might lack the unhinged edge of its sibling ROM cards, the Song Writer was the unsung hero that probably paid for a lot of musicians’ mortgages in 1995.