After aggressively dropping “Hitz” on the studio scene, E-MU apparently decided it was time to light a few candles, dim the glow of the rackmount displays, and get in touch with their feelings. Enter Vol. 2: Orchestral Moods.

Having retired the edgy, 90s-youth-culture “Z,” E-MU pivoted hard into sensitivity. This second floppy disk installment blessed your Proteus/2 with 64 freshly minted, “expressive and emotive” presets.

In the context of 1990s digital synthesizers, “expressive and emotive” was usually industry code for a very specific set of programming tricks. If you loaded up this bank, you could generally expect:

The Slow-Attack Strings: Perfect for when you needed the audience to know it was time to cry, but you also wanted to give them a three-second, volume-swelling warning.

The Lonely Woodwind: Guaranteed to make any piece of music feel like a desolate, soul-searching walk across a foggy Scottish moor.

The Angst-Ridden Mod Wheel: Patches where pushing the modulation wheel up didn’t just add standard vibrato: it added drama.

It was the ultimate studio lifehack. When a producer or director asked for “more feeling” but you really just wanted to go out for a sandwich, you popped in this disk, loaded a moody cello patch, and let the 16-bit melancholy do the heavy lifting.