drums synths ... rack or standalone??

Maybe someone can throw some thoughts into this.

I am wondering how to build up some percussion capabilities in my home studio.

Sonar 7 Studio has Session Drummer 2 but to be honest apart from the few basic kits its not really what I expected. Not sure if you can add additional kits to get more synth based drum sounds ??? But ...

So my thoughts turned to something external ... perhaps an Alesis drum pro or the latest DM5 ... use Sonar to trigger it ... or should I aim for an MPC1000 or something like this ??

I am into electronic synth tracks ... so whats your thoughts.

What do some of you guys putting tracks together use??

Software or hw based??

I'm a hardware guy so I tend to agree with Burster. I'd say that a used Electribe (EA/ER/ES, take your pick) will do nicely for electronic beats.

But if this is part of your computer rig and you don't need to travel/go onstage with it, everything that you want to do should be doable using Sonar.

I kind of stopped upgrading after Sonar 3 and never used Session Drummer so I can't tell you if you can expand the kits.

I did use Cyclone (when I wasn't using FL Studio) to make my own drum kits and did the sequencing on a MIDI track. For electronic stuff, it was easy to grid edit patterns. For more acoustic stuff I'd program using a DrumKat or a keyboard. You can also find plenty of MIDI tracks online to pilfer (if you want to cop the drums from a particular song, see if someone has done a MIDI arrangement, poach the song and pull the drum sequence out).

As far as samples and kits go, if you haven't been tripping over homemade 909 and 808 sample kits then you haven't been wasting enough of your life on the internet. I'd even dare say that some of the free acoustic drum kits out there are pretty damned good.

Also, remember that a drum patch on a softsynth is your typical organ/brass/fart patch with with a lot of attack and not much else. If you aren't trying to make a "realistic" drum patch or fool anyone into thinking you have a 909, drum patch programming is easy and fun. So is importing a sample of anything and cutting/mangling it into submission. Lots of software out there to do all of that. Some of the free stuff is absolutely fantastic if you feel cheap.

Try Guru.

On the software side Guru and Fruityloops do really nicely. Fruity loops does far more than just drum sequencing, however, so it may be over kill (its still my favorite application).

On the hardware side, the above mentioned units are great (though Id say a G2 engine would probably be not what you want - you would have to synthesize EVERY drum sound you want, and thats probably not what your after). I have an Electribe EMX1 which was my favorite until it died (unfortunate casualty of my recent move). I replaced it with an MC808, which is really cool, but not as fun as the EMX1. I have also used an MPC1000, and would definitely endorse that unit - but its only as good as what you feed it (no internal samples).

Right now, though, I am going all Ableton Drum rack and getting rid of my hardware drum machines and modules. If your already using ableton, I'd reccomend looking at that feature.

Not the cheapest but best user interface ever and extremely wide range of sounds: Machinedrum UW. Not for everyone though, but if you like modern/minimal techno with rich sounds it's hard to beat imho.

I wouldn't recommend it because of the sheer cost, but my drummer uses a Roland TD-12 with a {censored}load of lovely Zildjians both live and in the studio.

If I was to do things myself on the cheap, I'd probably try to sort something out with a cheap rack sampler, and some sort of "trigger pads go in, midi comes out" box. A Yamaha PTX-8 would also be on the list, most likely Old and crappy, but with some external effects processing I bet it could sound very interesting indeed.

+1

hmmm interesting options guy....

actually I bought a copy of battery 3 to try.....

mpc route sounds nice but ... expensive

ill see how NI's battery goes before a hw based route

so no one using hw rack based drums...??

I guess software kills it huh?

Drum machines, the desktop performance oriented kind, are definitely fun and useful. I still love programming beats on a physical machine now and again, and absolutely love the MPC and Electribes.

but rack drum synths....software really does beat them hands down.

with a rack unit your going to have a one space unit with a tiny LCD and just a couple buttons to interact with it. Because they are all older/vintage units, their OS is usually pretty cryptic. very very few have any kind of sample RAM functionality. Quality on board FX are a rarity too.

Now, I do actually have a couple of rack drum modules (an R8m and a Kawai XD-5), but they are only staying in the studio until I can get around to sampling their contents. They will be reduced to food for Ableton Drum Racks and FruityLoops. Then its off to ebay they go..

the PC is slowly killing the need for utilitarian hardware devices. Performance oriented instruments are what (so far) it hasnt touched. Drum machines..samplers...and now even VA synths are all being consumed into software.