Drum Machine Thoughts?

moogmusic · Post by **moogmusic** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 10:25 am

I'm thinking of investing in a drum machine, something interesting, second hand and fun. I was almost sold on an Electribe ER but spent yesterday doing some digging in the direction of other Electribes, a Roland R8/5 and maybe a Yamaha DX200?

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts/advice?

Thanks

UlricvonCatalyst · Post by **UlricvonCatalyst** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 11:14 am

Alesis SR-16 or Zoom RT-123 are both ubiquitous and cheap.

plaidbeer · Post by **plaidbeer** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 2:13 pm

The Yamaha DX200 isn't a drum machine. It's a tabletop FM synth module.

Do you want mainly acoustic or electric drum sounds or something in between? And what's your budget?

stewart · Post by **stewart** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 6:00 pm

i had a yamaha RM1X for a while, it was brilliant. you could probably get one for Â£150 or so. worth hunting down, but not especially common.

kim · Post by **kim** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 7:19 am

i've an r5 and the standard sounds on it sound very 80's like the lofi drumcomputers you hear in electroclash stuffs these days, or bondage fairies, it's alright

this track barely has fx on the r5's sound.
there's more usage of it on some other tracks but with more fx and more messy. as i record a track on the go because i'm too lazy to program so there's mistakes in there.

http://soundcloud.com/heavium/hvmsucks-demo

Viljami · Post by **Viljami** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 8:11 am

I have an Roland MC-303 "Groovebox" (ex-Aen = superior M@j@). It gets a ton of shit dropped on it in reviews "not very tweakable" "808 & 909 samples sound like shit" etc. etc. Which I do not agree on. To me they sounded just fine, played through my bass amp. One thing I do agree on that it is very, very hard to get into, even with Roland being total gents and publishing the manuals on their website. One thing I hear also about it is that it doesn't work very well in the studio (i.e. composing whole sections/songs on it), which I know nothing about, since I just program the beats and play over that. Can be had for relatively cheaps, but the pros recommend the MC-505, which is supposed to be superior.

Also, cannot make proper Big Beat with the MC-303.

Ben79 · Post by **Ben79** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 11:00 am

An MC303 is all I used to make music on from 1999 to 2002 and they're great, it kept crashing and wiping my songs which could be deeply depressing at times, but the drum samples are usable.

Really depends what kind of sounds you want. If you want to keep things open then you could get a sampler and controller but if you want banks of sounds all ready at your fingertips I would have thought a Boss would do what you wanted.

Could just use a laptop? Reason's Redrum is very easy to use, has loads of drums with it and accepts samples plus the sequencer is a doddle and is on a nice big colour screen. You can easily add reverb, distortion and compression too.

This is all coming out of Reason 2 using factory drum samples...

http://soundcloud.com/momsazombie/teamwork

moogmusic · Post by **moogmusic** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 1:35 pm

I think my main priority is something which can make some interesting sounds, hence my original interest in the Electribe. I'd not really considered the MC303/505 but I'll have another look. I've been trying to do drums with a computer for a while now and just not been getting anywhere so I want to go for something hardware based which will hopefully be a bit more immediate.

Thanks for the input.

71Smallbox · Post by **71Smallbox** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 4:08 pm

As far as the Electribes are concerned, Primal Scream gets some good sounds out of their ER-1's and EA-1's although they probably tweek the fuck out of them thru a laptop.

plaidbeer · Post by **plaidbeer** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 4:21 pm

What is your budget?

Mages · Post by **Mages** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 8:20 pm

UlricvonCatalyst wrote:Alesis SR-16 or Zoom RT-123 are both ubiquitous and cheap.

this. alesis drum machines all have very usable sounds and are easy to use.

Viljami wrote:I have an Roland MC-303 "Groovebox" (ex-Aen = superior M@j@). It gets a ton of shit dropped on it in reviews "not very tweakable" "808 & 909 samples sound like shit" etc. etc. Which I do not agree on. To me they sounded just fine, played through my bass amp. One thing I do agree on that it is very, very hard to get into, even with Roland being total gents and publishing the manuals on their website. One thing I hear also about it is that it doesn't work very well in the studio (i.e. composing whole sections/songs on it), which I know nothing about, since I just program the beats and play over that. Can be had for relatively cheaps, but the pros recommend the MC-505, which is supposed to be superior.

Also, cannot make proper Big Beat with the MC-303.

they're fine. people just shit on them because they're not a TB-303. the drums are going to be similar to all the other 90s roland ROMpler gear. which is fine.

moogmusic · Post by **moogmusic** » Fri Mar 23, 2012 9:02 am

Budgetwise, I'm thinking around Â£100 would be good although I could stretch to Â£150 for something worth it.

plaidbeer · Post by **plaidbeer** » Fri Mar 23, 2012 4:13 pm

I haven't had any experience with any of the Electribes, but from what I understand, they're a lot of fun and are really geared towards electric drum sounds vs. a mix of acoustic and electric.

Newer:
You might be on the lookout for a used Alesis SR-18, which is an updated version of the SR-16, so it would stand to reason that there would be a lot more sounds to play with. Goes for $260 new, which is just beyond your limit.
Zoom makes a lot of inexpensive drum machines that I've heard good things about, in terms of user-friendliness. Haven't tried one myself.

Older:
As others have said, a ton of Alesis SR-16s have been sold and it's still in production, so that says something for it, right?

I had a Roland R-70 which I liked quite a bit, but while you do have a lot of the classic older Roland TR and CR-series drum sounds, you also have a lot of dated early-90s drum sounds. On the other hand, some of those dated sounds are rather large sounding if you're into big-beat stuff. it came out 3-4 years after the R8, but didn't use expansion cards for sounds. Has a nice backlit display, too. What was onboard is what you got, but you can edit kits. A used R-70 would be near the top of your budget. Takes a little manual reading to get going, but I was able to program patterns ok.

A sort of cut-down version (in terms of sounds/features) of that would the Boss DR-660 which I also briefly had. No backlit display, though. I see 660s going for around $75 here in the States. Should be pretty common in the UK, too.

moogmusic · Post by **moogmusic** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:09 pm

Thanks for all the thoughts although in the end I just got an Electribe ER MK II I happened across in Johnny Roadhouse in Manchester. I have three and a half hours on a train this afternoon to get to grips with it so I hope it turns out to be fun...

moogmusic · Post by **moogmusic** » Mon May 14, 2012 3:03 pm

A little update on this (mainly to say SCORE!)

Did some programming with the Electribe and played a gig the other week. Lots of interesting sounds although it does sound a bit weedy sometimes. Fixed this by running it through a Boss CS-3 and ODB-3 which tightened it up and made it sound much bigger. Not too sure about gigging with a drum machine as opposed to a real person, it was very scary as it basically involved pressing play and then no errors allowed AT ALL until you hit the finishing line. On the plus side, it didn't moan about the long, fast ones.

Anyhoo, have decided to continue the experiment and have gotten myself a nice little treat to compliment the analog beats.

dezb1 · Post by **dezb1** » Mon May 14, 2012 3:27 pm

score indeed... 90% off