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??

Stylus RMX or Guru

I mostly use my Vermona Drm 1 MKII for analogue drums and percusion and my Fantom X for sampled drums and percusion. The Vermona is great but it doesn´t have any memory (except some paper sheets with holes to write down knob settings ;) )...

Hm I had a look at Stylus ... looks kind of complicated ...!!!!

my worry is I will spend more time tweaking that than composing on the keys!

I use battery3 because it has so many different drum sounds plus you can import your own.

It also allows you to edit the way each drum sample is played and has it's own effects engine.

At £140 it is much cheaper than most hardware solution plus it is easily accessible and tweakable from the PC screen.

ohh thats more like what I need!

:-)

I assume as a VST I would be able to use the Sonar step sequencer against the drum maps?

nice .. some classic electro kits in there too like the TR909 etc !

I think this is probably more useful to me....

if I can programme the midi sequences I need .... I only need simple beats / percussion

for example such as this .....

http://synthmusic.info/mp3s/Fluke5s2.mp3

Should work in Sonar similar to Cubase, you just add a new instrument track and select Battery3.

There are over 100 kits in there :eek:

Each drum sound has its own routing to the effects too so you can have reverb on bass and no reverb on snare for example and everything in between.

Machinedrum from Elektron is expensive, but very much worth it. It's a dedicated drum synth module with the really great feature that every osc, amp, filter, lfo, etc. setting can be synced to a different value for each sequence step. You can get some crazy sounds out of it and can import your own samples as well with the UW version.

Actually one of the reason I quite like Stylus RMX is it has loads of loops in it, so if you just want to make a rough beat to jam against by layering up some loops then it takes no time at all.

As for hardware options - my two favourite at the moment are an akai mpc and an electron machine drum.

Both of them can can very useful for sequencing drum sounds in other synths - especially the MPC (I have the 2500). The machinedrum is best is you want to mostly program it and want to do some crazy shit, the akai mpc is better is you want to play and record stuff on its pads it allways seems to have a real nice groove to it.