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Looper's Delight
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Some things that always frustrated me about the MC-505: * The percussion sounds are grouped into huge mute groups which generally didn't match the way I wanted to break things up. Since I don't think you could use the the rhythm kits as instruments, you were basically stuck. * Too many sounds in a rhythm kit. How can that be a bad thing? I don't want 60 or more sounds to choose from when writing a groove. I want a small set with good tweakable parameters. Instead I'm octave-shifting up and down looking for the desired drum hit. * Saving patterns requires stopping playback. * Fiddly, fiddly, fiddly. Some things that I liked: * RPS was fun. A pain to program, but having a good set of RPS phrases was a simple way to start building material. Muting and unmuting tracks isn't the same thing since it keeps things in the same position in the pattern. Other drum machines that I've owned: * Korg DDM-110 and DDM-220. (I've actually still got the DDM-220 Super Percussion). Really cheesy. A relatively tedious step time interface for recording. I used to program complicated polyrhythms on these. I must have been really dedicated at the time. On the other hand, I recently found some tracks recorded with them and they were at least interesting. I did the score for a play largely with these machines assorted delays and reverbs and a bass player. * Korg DDD-1: Noisy, relatively low-quality samples. A buggy, crash-prone MIDI implementation. On the other hand, it had a nice version of motion-sequencing. I've got recordings from the time when I had this machine and I find myself missing it. * Alesis SR-16: Lots of nice presets. Decent sounds. The pads never felt comfortable to me and I never really did much programming on it. * Roland MC-505: See above. End result was that I did some stuff on it, but it never inspired me to go in and crank out patterns. Other electronic percussion: * Roland HandSonic: Still have it. In fact, this through a delay line is essentially my only percussion instrument right now. Don't even think about trying to do much with the sequencer on this, however. The sounds are decent if not stunning. The effects are good but could easily have been a lot more versatile. For example, they are basically the same effects as on the SP-808 and that machine has 3 knobs that it uses to great effect for live manipulation while the HandSonic which also has 3 knobs doesn't do diddly with them. * Emu Planet Earth: Best damn percussion sounds I've dealt with once you forgive its lack of a tabla. On the other hand, you've got to either like the kits Emu has put together or burn a bunch of channels to get a combination of sounds. Burning a bunch of channels would then have required a mapper of some sort for use with the HandSonic. It's also back to the problem from the MC-505 of having too many sounds in a preset rather than a few really good, really tweakable sounds. Temptations: * I kept being tempted by an Emu Command Station because of the quality of the sounds on the Planet Earth. My reaction when I played with them at guitar center was fiddly, fiddly, fiddly. * A Korg Electribe has some attraction for the price and the immediacy but it blows the immediacy by requiring that it be stopped to do some things like tweak the swing setting. * The Elektron Machinedrum is cool, but at that price I'm a bit frustrated that it only maps MIDI velocity to volume and for that matter doesn't even record MIDI velocity. Wishes: * A real "MIDI looper" should arguably support: record/play sounds/end loop and set the tempo based on that. Mark