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Looper's Delight
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>I have to go on record, as a drum programming snob,to say that Matt >Davignon's set >at Y2K3 turned me on as much as anything I"ve ever seen a person do with a >drum machine >in a live show. Just a beautiful and quirky and fascinating set, Matt. >You singlehandely >rekindled my interest in >the live use of drum machines with your set. Aw, shucks. That means a lot, especially when I started my set by saying "I apologize in advance if this sucks". Rick's got a lot of good points with his (article?) on drum machine use, especially with the point of simplifying things down. I've been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately, and one thing I've found in common about my 2 favorite producers (RZA and El-Producto) is that their actual drum machine rhythms are amazingly minimal. Rather than bury the rest of the song in layers and layers of drum programming, they stick to 2 or 3 sounds, and spend a lot of time making designing their kicks and snares. A drum machine is not and will never be a live human drummer. If you need the sound of real drums, I'd suggest you either meet a drummer, or even better, learn to play real drums enough to fit your needs. As Rick alluded, there's a lot of variation in live drums that we often don't notice, but we miss it if it's gone. If we ask a drummer to play a repetitive phrase, there are minute differences in the timing between beats, as well as minute differences between each occurence of the same drum. That's why a sampled drum beat sounds more repetitive than a live drummer playing the same thing. So the strategy I'd suggest would be to find ways to bring that variation back, if you want your drum machine to not sound so "canned". I find that pitch changers work well, as does a slight amount of distortion. I'm also fond of using the bit-reduction effect (aka "Lo-Fi") on my Dr. Sample. Sometimes, using 3 or 4 seperate sounds together as a single "snare" makes things sound more interesting too. That's it for now, mostly because it's 5 am and I need to be up in a few hours. _________________________________________________________________ Get holiday tips for festive fun. http://special.msn.com/network/happyholidays.armx