Drum Machine

Have you ever seen David “fingers” Haynes finger drumming on the Akai Mpcx?

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I have now, thanks :slight_smile:

Incredible, not just because of the ability to do the patterns but for the expressiveness. Sounds great.

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Sounds just as expressive as an actual drummer here.

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Haha. I watched the video and looked to my left where my Maschine sits and just had to laugh. :smiley:

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Heh I know, right? I’ve been using drum machines and/or controllers with pads on and off for a really long time, and still I look at that guy and think “LOL, nope.”

But for anyone wondering what the difference between a drum machine and something like the BeatBuddy is, this is a good illustration - a drum machine is a musical instrument. It’s just that most people don’t do it live all at once like this guy :slight_smile:

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Man this sound so good… Amazing how he just sounds like a pro drummer just by using his fingers. This would actually be a good solution for gigs in really small veneus haha. I just can’t imagine that drummers would be interested in this. Drumkits have a lot of magic and appeal to it.

For sure! Drum machines are a lot less expressive than this guy tho. Machines just follows patterns with an occasionally fill. But it’s a good solution for not having a drummer or just for practice.

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Yeah.

I basically just use them as ROMplers with other controllers these days and program the drums in the midi sequencer myself. But you can also input MIDI using the pads and just play the drum parts in too, which I’ve certainly done plenty of.

I guess you could use the BeatBuddy as a ROMpler too but drum plugins are so cheap and good now there’s no reason to. Better to get a controller like the Maschine or the MPC, MPD, or many others and just use them in software. For my workflow anyway.

Man, that guy is amazing on the pads though. Just blows me away how expressive he gets. That’s not easy. Hell, even consistency can be hard with them :slight_smile:

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He is next level for sure! I remember when this was becoming a thing when a guy made a demo of Avicii on his pads.

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I would say that folks like Daft Punk or Prodigy would argue about this statement. :smiley: There’s a lot of grooves hidden in any velocity-sensitive DM. The only issue is that it’s tedious to program it.

Speaking of legendary performances:

This single video made Novation Launchpad bigger than world.

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lol I think you misunderstand my comment. I was just comparing a drum machine with a live drummer (in this case a finger drummer) in the context of jamming/practice with your bass. Pretty sure a live drummer or someone behind a synthesizer sound more expressive then my beatbuddy. :grin:

Drum machines and EDM producers are a completely different ballgame imo. Daft Punk and Prodigy are super talented musicians and producers. Liam Howlett is a genius of his time. I still listen sometimes to Fat of the the Land!

I think it was also Madeon who made that Avicii cover?

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EZdrummer is really good too, gives you a lot of options starting with library beats and then you can customize them. I often start out creating my drum backing track in guitar pro and then I import it into Reaper and EZdrummer.

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I think … I misunderstood your post. :smiley: … Liam is insane. For me it’s Music For Jilted Generation, I was like, how do they make all these sounds when little 12 years old me was listening to that cassette on repeat?

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EZDrummer is a great looking plugin! And really well liked and recommended. I’m using SSD5 myself but either EZDrummer or Addictive 2 look great too.

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If I should chose one plugin sequencer it would be XO from XLN, it’s not cheap, but it’s packed with features and it’s also sample library explorer.

I seriously considered XO. XO looks amazing. Love its spatial explorer view.

In the end I wanted mostly just a simple, good sounding plugin though. I’m at the point where laying down drum tracks themselves is kind of second nature for me - I did it for years so I am just used to it. So simple, good, and (relatively) cheap was what I was looking for.

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I am using Atlas from Algonaut, because it has more layouts (up to 8x8 for Launchpad … Introducing Atlas | Algonaut - YouTube ), but if I wanted an easy sequencer, I would go for XO. If I wanted a top sequencer there’s nothing more powerful than Geist2, and if you want to go really bonkers BeatTweaker from iZotope gets you covered.

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I’m kind of the other direction with them - I don’t really use the sequencing or pattern features of the plugins at all. Mostly what I want from drum plugins is very simple, basically a sample manager that’s already done the work of mapping midi velocity and so on to the correct samples, and the same with different strike areas and so on. More or less just one step above doing it all with a sampler myself. I do everything else in the DAW midi sequencer by hand, which actually is pretty fast for me now.

Super old school but I’m pretty efficient with it.

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This Yamaha cracked me up:

Lol, apparently everyone except Roland and Alesis made a SR-16 clone :rofl:

I had a Zoom RT-223 which was another one.

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