what's the best softsynth drum machine

the Redrum in Reason is what you want.. 808 style set up where you can input your own samples and edit how they're played to a deeper extent than just accenting and pitch and stuff. I've been using it for years and still manage to do new things. Plus, you can trigger the shit out of everything else which tends to make some awesome results.

  On 8/28/2009 at 3:51 PM, mafted said:

the Redrum in Reason is what you want.. 808 style set up where you can input your own samples and edit how they're played to a deeper extent than just accenting and pitch and stuff. I've been using it for years and still manage to do new things. Plus, you can trigger the shit out of everything else which tends to make some awesome results.

yes, this and the nnxt make great soft-drum machines

yeah redrum's pretty great, too bad reason has no MIDI-out

redrum's great, but if you already have ultrabeat in logic, you can use that as a synth drum. it's dense... but check out the pdfs. you can do simple kicks from sine waves and one envelope, etc. if you want you can just right click a voice and do init>kick drum, init>hihat, etc, and get good starting points for synth drums that you can tweak however. and you can automate all the shit in ultrabeat too and get transforming sounds etc. use lots of modulation like LFOs and shit and you can get metallic, whatever, autechre shit.

personally i use a hardware drummachine that does sampling and synth shit, the electribe emx1. i got it for like $300 used on ebay and its nice. hardware is fun.

i really get sick of mice, fucks my shoulder up.

another thing thats nice about ultrabeat is the grid sequencer is really nice. you can just drag and makes string of notes really quickly. piano roll in reason is also great but theres something really fluid about ultrabeat that makes it great for making 32nd note patterns really fast. i also like the drag and drop pattern making.

honestly, you should just find some samples and load them into ultrabeat, since thats all battery is, a sampler. but i guess battery has great samples, so there you go. i was dissatisfied with my drums for a long time too and i kept changing drum machines, like ultrabeat, redrum, fruity loops, whatever, and now that ive been through a bunch im content with whatever. maybe you just need to quest a bit and scan the market until you realize that its all the same really.

and garageband is probably fine too, but it's just kind of ugly and has a noob stigma attached to it.

yeah. i'm starting to realize that ultrabeat is pretty good. it's more about how much work i have to put in to make it sound pro.

i decided i'm going with microtonic+synplant.

why synplant. Its a synth, not a drummachine? Or does it come bundled with microtonic?

  On 8/30/2009 at 9:21 PM, vamos scorcho said:

yeah. i'm starting to realize that ultrabeat is pretty good. it's more about how much work i have to put in to make it sound pro.

 

This thread happens all the time. Some noob, without absolutely no prior experience in production\music, decides "i want to make teh idmz". At this point, he already regards himself as an idm musician, which in his mind grants him some instant minor importance that would warrant people trampling each other to instill in him "that cool drum sound" or whatever he thinks IDM or braindance or whatever is.

What follows is usually like 1 post of really bad advice from a know-it-all fellow noob, some incredibly patient and gentle advice from a couple of guys that are always like that (which i find incredible and i salute them for their kindness), and 3 pages of what basically translates to "you're a clueless fucktard". Then the guy who only 5 posts above was begging for help instanly becomes his majesty the fucking self-sufficient king of production, repelling any critique, snowballing into endless explaining of his initial post, and basically having a bitch fit.

But in WATMM, the pattern has finally been broken (at least in my experience). The petulant troll-noob has shown actual human being qualities, has backpedaled and has learned from what he's been told. This goes only as further proof that WATMM = good people. Even its noob-trolls are more mature than every other forum's.

Vamos Scorcho, i apologize if i condescendingly used you as a case study, but i just had to have my teary-eyed revelation online.

And, whatever you do, don' buy Battery. Trust me.

ha you've got me figured out. definitely not buying battery. looks like it's overpriced and not what i'm looking for. micro tonic demo has proven to be pretty fantastic.

  Quote

For your purposes, what features would you like to see in a synthesizer?

 

Well, the development of synthesizers so far has all been predicated on a particular assumption that I feel I no longer agree with. That assumption is that the best synthesizer is the one that gives you the largest number of possibilities. Clearly this is what's been happening with the big digital synthesizers. Now, the effect of this on the players - or at least the conspicuous effect, as far as I can see - is that the players move very quickly from sound to sound, so that for any new situation there would be a novel sound for it, because there's such a wide palette to choose from. This seems to me to produce a compositional weakness. These players are working in terms of sounds they don't really understand yet, you know - the sound is too novel for them to have actually understood its strengths and weaknesses, and to have made something on that basis. It's like continually being given a new instrument. Well, that's exciting for the player. Every ten minutes somebody says, "Hey, here's another instrument. Now try this one." But from the point of view of the music, it seems to produce a rather shallow compositional approach. Frequently in the studios, you see synthesizer players fiddling for six hours getting this sound and then that sound and so on, in a kind of almost random search. What's clear if you're watching this process, is that what they're in search of is not a new sound but a new idea. The synthesizer gives them the illusion that they'll find it somewhere in there. Really, it would make more sense to sit down and say, "Hey, look what am I doing? Why don't I just think for a minute, and then go and do it?" Rather than this scramble through the electrons. You could contrast this approach to that taken by Glenn Gould, for instance. In the article in Contemporary Keyboard [see Keyboard , Aug. '80] he mentions the fact that he has been working with the same piano for years and years. Clearly he understands that piano in a way that no synthesizer player alive understands his instrument. You see, there are really distinct advantages to working within a quite restricted range of possibilities, and getting a deeper and deeper understanding of those.

from an interview with brian eno, originally published in 1981, then repeated (with a new introduction) in keyboard wizards, winter 1985, conducted by jim aikin

Liveslice (vst) and Fruityloops are good for crazy beats, you can even combine those two if you want!

  On 8/28/2009 at 1:57 AM, vamos scorcho said:

(excuse my anger in the following post but my blood pressure skyrocketed when i saw "it's not the tool but how you use it")

 

 

alright obviously i don't know shit about the words and meanings behind them. why? because i don't care. why? because it doesn't interest me.

 

B.

I know it's how you use them. but there is only so far you can go. are you trying to tell me that i could make a beat as quality as easily with hammerhead than i could with a fucking electron machinedrum? BUZZER. incorrect. the tools do matter, in fact with electronic music they matter a hell of a lot. my shitty free softsynth collection is NEVER, EVER going to sound as good as the real deal. but i can't afford that shit so i have to make do with "how i'm using it" in writing melodies and bizarre song structures that will make up for the fact that i'm poor as hell.

 

that whole fucking thing is so tired. try covering a song off of drukqs in garageband. yup, it's not fucking easy (i mean, it's 100% impossible). what if i was restricted to those drumkits. christ that pisses me off really badly being told that, because i figure i use the machinery as good as anybody else and it seems very condescending to me to be told that i need to pay more attention to "how i use" shit. fuck that shit.

 

that said, yes i suppose if you can't figure out what i'm looking for from my description then fuck it i'll explain again

 

i want a drum machine with presets and the ability to purchase more presets, also with effects and whatnot inside. if i say, "i want something like battery" maybe you can draw the fucking line yourself and not ridicule me for not knowing the difference between a sampler and a synth.

 

ok shit that's all. i guess i'll just buy battery considering there isn't a single constructive or helpful post in this entire thread, apart from some of the first ones

You're asking for something that will give you the ability to make beats like squarepusher etc. It requires effort. You seem to be against the idea of having to do anything that requires effort (including asking a question in a polite manner to people who could actually help you). With that being said....toss an amen into fruityloops and put dblue glitch over the top.

It really IS how you use the tools and not so much the tools themselves. Somebody using an ancient program that they know inside and out will make much more interesting stuff than somebody using a huge and intricate program for the first time.

i like RMIV

microtonic is also fantastic

neither is huge and intricate by any means -- if you've used drum synths and plugins and etc. before you'll feel at home

  On 8/31/2009 at 1:35 AM, kaini said:

  Quote

For your purposes, what features would you like to see in a synthesizer?

 

Well, the development of synthesizers so far has all been predicated on a particular assumption that I feel I no longer agree with. That assumption is that the best synthesizer is the one that gives you the largest number of possibilities. Clearly this is what's been happening with the big digital synthesizers. Now, the effect of this on the players - or at least the conspicuous effect, as far as I can see - is that the players move very quickly from sound to sound, so that for any new situation there would be a novel sound for it, because there's such a wide palette to choose from. This seems to me to produce a compositional weakness. These players are working in terms of sounds they don't really understand yet, you know - the sound is too novel for them to have actually understood its strengths and weaknesses, and to have made something on that basis. It's like continually being given a new instrument. Well, that's exciting for the player. Every ten minutes somebody says, "Hey, here's another instrument. Now try this one." But from the point of view of the music, it seems to produce a rather shallow compositional approach. Frequently in the studios, you see synthesizer players fiddling for six hours getting this sound and then that sound and so on, in a kind of almost random search. What's clear if you're watching this process, is that what they're in search of is not a new sound but a new idea. The synthesizer gives them the illusion that they'll find it somewhere in there. Really, it would make more sense to sit down and say, "Hey, look what am I doing? Why don't I just think for a minute, and then go and do it?" Rather than this scramble through the electrons. You could contrast this approach to that taken by Glenn Gould, for instance. In the article in Contemporary Keyboard [see Keyboard , Aug. '80] he mentions the fact that he has been working with the same piano for years and years. Clearly he understands that piano in a way that no synthesizer player alive understands his instrument. You see, there are really distinct advantages to working within a quite restricted range of possibilities, and getting a deeper and deeper understanding of those.

 

from an interview with brian eno, originally published in 1981, then repeated (with a new introduction) in keyboard wizards, winter 1985, conducted by jim aikin

I don't really agree with that on the whole, but he does make good points. I find it difficult though to not get "locked in" or "entranced" while programming a sound, and honestly that's a lot of what i enjoy. I certainly agree with his comment about lots of options, presets, lots of sounds. But I think that can apply differently if you have a synth full of sounds you took time to program. I personally like to start from scratch and make pretty much every sound a "new" sound starting from an initialized synth patch in my songs. HOwever that doesn't mean I don't occasionally go into my library of sounds i have programmed previously. A lot of times it's a sound ive already made, forgotten about, and then rediscovered fits the song perfectly.

all synthesizers should come with a random preset generator button (percentage of randomness would be a bonus) . I've noticed alot more software synths and even some new hardware editors (dave smith poly or monoevolvers) are implementing this feature. i personally love using it, it will never get boring for me.

drumatic is awesome.

don't believe the battery hype.. it's not gonna make your drumtracks for you, no piece of equipment will.

It's not so much the drum machine or whatever.. you can get a few samples and load them after eachother on a grid, and with some production and understanding of EQ and compression you can get that to sound lethal/disgusting/whatever the latest buzzword for a cool sounding beat is.

Also the strength of a beat depends on how it sounds in relation to the track, if the mix as a whole is muddy it won't matter if you got your aphex beats or whatever.

disco smile EQ generally works good, and independently treating every drumhit, so you don't use the same processing on the bass and snare.

yeah i lover battery it's my fav, but i use my own samples with it. I can't imagine it being that awesome using stock sounds.

and @ mesh gear fos: i loved the random generator on my microwave xt, it was great for times i was feeling uninspired, and tweaking from that didn't feel at all like i was using presets (something i refuse to do unless it's a piano or real instrument sound in nexus)

my fav drum softsynths are:

all the d16 group stuff

waldorf attack

sonic charge microtonic

stomper

fm8 (not drum synth per se but i make drum sounds with it and sample them)

terratec komplexer (same as above)

vaz/nord modular (same as previous 2)

refx quadra sid (sample this as well for nes/c64 sounds)

sample based:

addictive drums

battery