[ddots-l] Re: accessible drum machine
- From: "Stacy Bleeks" <sbleeks@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 23:56:50 -0400
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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