Drum machines

Well, I'm a drummer but find it very hard to play drums and guitar at the same time.

I have a GNX3000 and it has many drum rhythms built in. That's one way I put backing drums behind my guitar work.

I have a Zoom RT-223. It sounds good to me. I use it just for playing and practicing bass, so I play a rhythm and play over it. It has more than 400 patterns and all of them are very usable. Usually I practice with blues, shuffle and rock patterns but it also has some good patterns for jazz (there is a set called 'brush' that are cool for playing jazz bass lines).

It is very easy create songs. It has a mode in which you can select several patterns for each song part (intro, verse, bridge, etc.) by hand and it also can be 'programmed' easily by introducing number in a formulae-like way. For example, if you wish the pattern #30 twice and the #80 four times you should write something like 2*30+4*80. It is an advantage against another systems and drum machines. It also can generate the bass line. I have disabled this feature permanently but if you want to use it for composing songs it could be interesting.

When I bought it (last christmas) a friend lent me a Alesis SR-16. It also sounds good and it is a classic drum machine. Probably it needs more dedication because the sounds has too many reverb. It can be suppressed but you have to change those parameters. I also made songs but it is slightly hard: you have to select each pattern while it is played, I mean you need to play while you are creating the song. I didn't change the volume or I didn't find how to do it.

I recorded some tracks with the Alesis and I can prepare some new tracks with the Zoom if you wish to compare sounds. Let me know if you need anything. You also can find some good videos on YouTube.

http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

It's a free computer program. I use it to practice like a metronome (just looping 1 pattern constantly at a certain tempo), but you can actually use it to program entire drum parts in songs (I've programmed a 5 minute song with at least a dozen different drum parts). I highly recommend it since i believe you can always record your own drum sounds if you don't like the ones that come with the program. As well, if you record anything using audacity, you can import the full hydrogen files into audacity, without having to worry about recording it.

+1 for Hydrogen - I ran into it on a post here and downloaded it; and it's excellent. You program a series of patterns and sequence them and it's about as intuitive as you can get.

A :-)

I used to own the Alesis SR-16, the same model as Nuno - I found it fairly easy to use at a basic level, and it sounded pretty good played through my bass amp, not as good through a guitar amp. The handbook's pretty thick - there's a heck of a lot to it, and I just didn't have the time to fiddle about with it, so I sold it on. You CAN programme entire songs with it - including different drum patterns, tempos, fills etc...or you can just hit individual pads. There are literally hundreds, if I remember correctly, of different drum sounds you can get (still haven't worked out what "wet frog" is....) and it's not too expensive at around £70.

I actually wish I hadn't sold it now, but on the whole it might have been easier to learn to play drums!

:D :D :D

Vic

Tried to download Hydrogen it ends with .tar.gz what the heck kind of extention is that? Can I not use this program with windows?

If you use this link - http://www.hydrogen-music.org/?p=download - and click on "Windows installer (experimental)" you can download the Windows installer exe file.

'tar.gz' is a typical extension in Unix domains. We could say it is equivalent to a '.zip' or '.rar', it is a file that include several files and it is compressed. It seems you downloaded the source code.

Lol I have no clue what I'm doing, I actually found a human drummer so he might help me out.

I understand you. I bought the Zoom because it is very easy and it is 'ready for use'. I wanted just for practicing bass, I didn't a new instrument at home. Probably the software drum machines are better and more versatile than the hardware devices. A couple of friends also recommended to me ezDrummer, but I only wanted something to plug into the amp and play my bass.

Try Addictive Drums, relatively cheap (199$) but it's great. Lots of kits and grooves, fills and such, all editable.

Here's another freebie
http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/
It can't do extremely complex stuff, but for a fairly straight rhythm it's fine.

Lol I have no clue what I'm doing, I actually found a human drummer so he might help me out.

That's the key to it!

There's an almost endless list of ways to make drums tracks - including, drum machines, a big range of software options, midi keyboards, free downloadable loops, etc etc. But it's also really important to have some basic ideas about how to put a drum track together - otherwise you can end up with either a noisy mess, monotonous loops with no variety, or a mish-mash that doesn't really match the music. Get as much info from that drummer as you can. :)

Try Addictive Drums, relatively cheap (199$) but it's great. Lots of kits and grooves, fills and such, all editable.

I was going to mention Addictive also. Great software. And the price has been dropping, I've seen it as low as $119 at Guitar Center.