beatbox
The last actual drum machine I owned was the Roland TR-626, a meat-and-taters beatbox with very basic drum kit sounds. You could tune the sounds, though, and it had individual outs for each instrument - a very pro feature back in the day - so you could get all busy with stomp boxes and such. You could (and I did) also MIDI it up to a sampler and use it as a controller.
Lately, I've been thinking about drum machines again - with pads and sliders so I can poke and wiggle. All my beats are built on-screen, using virtual tools like ReBirth and Reason - with considerable editing in Pro Tools. This ain't a very visceral process - all well and good for brainiac IDM grooves, but definitely lacking in the expression dept., IMHO. I've always had a thing for the MPC family of production tools, but they seemed overly complex for my intentions. I didn't need all the sequencer faddle, and I like editing samples on the Mac where I can really see the waveform (especially after all those years of doing it on teeny tiny displays, sometimes with just numbers to go by). Now, though, they've got the little battery-powered MPC-500, and it looks like just the ticket. Beats on the fly, sampling the Moog - oh, the possibilities...being able to work up ideas without a laptop. It's still a bit pricey for this old cheapy (coming from someone who bought a Moog Voyager brand new - with the blue wheels!) but it sure does appeal.
Might just be nostalgia for the old days when options were limited and tools were simpler - some of my wildest tracks came out of an Ensoniq Mirage hooked up to an MMT-8. But I don't really want to go back to those days. Nothing like spending hours editing a sound using a hex display and then losing it to a power spike; of course, nothing beats losing all your soft-synth authorizations when you run an OS update, either! See, recently I updated my G4 to 10.4.10 (does that look as wrong to you as it does to me, seeing as how it follows 10.4.9? Yeah, thought so) and now all my IK Multimedia stuff wants new authorization keys - and I'm too lazy to do it. My Tele never asks for a product key...
Lately, I've been thinking about drum machines again - with pads and sliders so I can poke and wiggle. All my beats are built on-screen, using virtual tools like ReBirth and Reason - with considerable editing in Pro Tools. This ain't a very visceral process - all well and good for brainiac IDM grooves, but definitely lacking in the expression dept., IMHO. I've always had a thing for the MPC family of production tools, but they seemed overly complex for my intentions. I didn't need all the sequencer faddle, and I like editing samples on the Mac where I can really see the waveform (especially after all those years of doing it on teeny tiny displays, sometimes with just numbers to go by). Now, though, they've got the little battery-powered MPC-500, and it looks like just the ticket. Beats on the fly, sampling the Moog - oh, the possibilities...being able to work up ideas without a laptop. It's still a bit pricey for this old cheapy (coming from someone who bought a Moog Voyager brand new - with the blue wheels!) but it sure does appeal.
Might just be nostalgia for the old days when options were limited and tools were simpler - some of my wildest tracks came out of an Ensoniq Mirage hooked up to an MMT-8. But I don't really want to go back to those days. Nothing like spending hours editing a sound using a hex display and then losing it to a power spike; of course, nothing beats losing all your soft-synth authorizations when you run an OS update, either! See, recently I updated my G4 to 10.4.10 (does that look as wrong to you as it does to me, seeing as how it follows 10.4.9? Yeah, thought so) and now all my IK Multimedia stuff wants new authorization keys - and I'm too lazy to do it. My Tele never asks for a product key...
posted by tay0 at 08:18
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