[ddots-l] Re: accessible drum machine

Hi Justin,

First.  That HR16 is a great little drum machine.  It's got a nice groove to it.

If you have a midi keyboard controller, you can, using Sonar, access some soft 
synths that come with Sonar.  For example The roland x o x series of drum 
sounds such as the 6O6, 8O8, 9O9, plus many others like the CR78 and various 
kick drums, snares, high hats, ride cymbals, toms etc. etc. are all accessible 
via the soft synths and played using your midi keyboard controller.  Some of 
these drum sounds will lay the entire drum kit out along the keys on your 
keyboard and sometimes a single drum sound like a snare or a clap or a zap or a 
tamborine will take up the entire keyboard with each key being a different 
pitch.  Like with many drum machines and groove boxes you can quantize your 
beats so that they line up a little tighter.  I'll be honest, I have used a few 
programmable drum machines in the past and their ability to easily nail the 
quantizing feature was more intuitive but if you play the keys right on the 
first or second take this isn't much of an issue.    Most of the drum sounds 
played using the midi keyboard are touch/velocity sensitive so if you press a 
little harder the beat will be stronger and if you hold it a touch longer it 
will ride a little longer.  

In other words, it works.  

I'm hoping that someone else can speak to the whole quantizing thing so that 
our beats will come out a little tighter etc.

There is also something called Session Drummer.  I know you were talking about 
making your own beats from scratch but this Sonar feature is useful as it gives 
you a pretty decent range of drum patterns that you can customize at will.

Check out Omar Binno's site and listen to the beats he's been cooking up.

Hope this helps.

Stacy


----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Justin Daubenmire 
  To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 5:14 PM
  Subject: [ddots-l] accessible drum machine


  All,

  I am checking out sonar 6 and had a question for creating my own drum beats.

  I used to have an Alesis HR-16B drum machine that had around 30 drum kits in 
it and it had 16 programmable pads. You can make the pads be whatever you wanted
  such as kick, snare, high hat, crashes, etc. Then it let you hit the pads and 
create your own beats via a sequence click. It would record your beats for you 
as a pattern.
  You could record, for example, 4 or 5 patterns then copy/paste them in the 
order you wanted and save it as a song. I.E intro, verse
  1, chorus, bridge, etc.

  Does anyone know of any accessible drum machine software that would let me do 
this?  I'd like to do this on the computer now and not use an external drum 
machine since I am sure it is possible, however, I cannot seem to find any 
accessible software package to accomplish this task.

  Ideally I would like to have a drum machine software package totally outside 
of sonar and create my beats for my songs outside of sonar then port them into 
sonar as a track. However, I am not all that familiar with sonar yet as I am 
just investigating it so if it is possible to do this within sonar using drum 
kits please let me know. Any feedback much appreciated.

  What I do not want is premixed/created drum beats that I can use as a track. 
I want to be able to totally create my own beats using different drum kits. 
That is very important for me to be able to say, for example, use this kick, 
that snare, this ride, and make/record my own beats from scratch.

  thanks for any feedback/help!


  Regards,
  Justin

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