Drum machine recommendations

[leighelse]

I've had a second afternoon with my BR-1600, and discovered the frustrations (and a lot of positives) with the drum sequencer. Despite making good progress, I suspect it's going to cause me ongoing grief.

A lot of the music I write has bars of odd lengths. The song may mostly be in 4/4, but the chorus might have two bars of 3/4 in the middle, or the bridge might be in 7/4. I don't think the BR-1600's drum sequencer is going to let me do this. Can anyone confirm this, or am I wrong: can I throw a bar of 5/4 into a common time track, for example? The user manual suggests the fifth beat will be dropped.

The track I've been working on today has five bars of 3/4 in the middle of the chorus, but I got away with these by adding one additional beat, taking the total to 16, and creating a four custom bar 4/4 drum pattern.

Programming the drum sequencer isn't straightforward either, although I did make good progress once I realised the critical importance of specifying the number of measures for each selected pattern.

When I launched into digital recording I built my own drum tracks from scratch in a piano roll. Latterly I've been using Onyx arranger to map out the song, then exporting the drum track as a MIDI file and finessing it in a piano roll. Onyx turns out quite usable patterns, but some of the drum patches aren't standard, so I've often needed to cut and paste entire rows in the piano roll.

All of which is a much too wordy preamble. What I'd like to know is this: given my penchant for mixing time signatures, and the way I've worked with MIDI drums in the past, can you recommend an external drum machine that would play nicely with the BR-1600? If you use a drum machine with your BR-1600, which one? And why?

[ODH]

Hi Leigh

I use a lot of unusual time signatures and I find DM-1 very good. In this you can set the length of each bar separately and has a wide range of drum-machine, acoustic and instrument kits. It's also very easy to switch between kits and layer. It has two channels of onboard effects. 

It's an iOS app for iPhone/ iPad. 

I record to GarageBand in the phone nowadays but I've recorded out to my Zoom R16 in the past using the headphone jack.

[leighelse]

Thanks Nick.

I have a predominantly Linux ecosystem, but you've put me on a useful path of discovery. The path has led me fairly quickly to Hydrogen, which I've installed and tinkered with and think could be pretty useful. You can load kits and patterns, and I see a number of both available for download. You can add your own samples, something I often want to do. There are also Python scripts to import MIDI files, breaking them into the one-bar patterns Hydrogen uses.

I'm still interested in a hardware solution because I could synchronise it with the BR-1600 rather than recording the drums as an audio file. I've had more than one instance over the years where I'm only aware of a balance issue with the drumkit when I get to mixing or mastering - there's a limit to what can be tweaked with EQ alone.

::Leigh

[64Guitars]

A lot of the music I write has bars of odd lengths. The song may mostly be in 4/4, but the chorus might have two bars of 3/4 in the middle, or the bridge might be in 7/4. I don't think the BR-1600's drum sequencer is going to let me do this. Can anyone confirm this, or am I wrong: can I throw a bar of 5/4 into a common time track, for example? The user manual suggests the fifth beat will be dropped.

You can do this by creating a Beat Map. See page 199 of the BR-1600 manual.

When I launched into digital recording I built my own drum tracks from scratch in a piano roll. Latterly I've been using Onyx arranger to map out the song, then exporting the drum track as a MIDI file and finessing it in a piano roll. Onyx turns out quite usable patterns, but some of the drum patches aren't standard, so I've often needed to cut and paste entire rows in the piano roll.

You can import standard midi files into the BR-1600 as patterns. These would be separate short patterns which you would use in an arrangement (optionally, along with the BR-1600's preset patterns). So perhaps the easiest way for you to create drum tracks is to use Onyx Arranger, edit in a piano roll and export as a standard midi file. Then import that SMF into a BR-1600 pattern. Or, depending on the type of finessing you do in the piano roll, you might be able to skip that step, importing the midi file directly from Onyx Arranger and doing your finessing in the BR-1600.

Other BR models allow you to import an entire drum track as a standard midi file. So your arrangement would basically have just one pattern that's the entire length of the song (up to 999 measures). Unfortunately, the BR-1600 limits imported patterns to just 8 measures long. So you'll have to break your Onyx drum track into separate patterns which you'd import into the BR-1600 and use in an arrangement.

See SMF Import on page 161 of the BR-1600 manual.

can you recommend an external drum machine that would play nicely with the BR-1600? If you use a drum machine with your BR-1600, which one? And why?

I haven't used any external drum machines with my BR so I don't have any recommendations. However, if your BR-1600 is near your computer, you can use MIDI to sync them. This would allow you to create drum tracks in Hydrogen, for example, and not have to import them as audio tracks until you do your final mix. Hydrogen effectively becomes your external drum machine and is controlled by the BR's transport controls so that the drums always start and stop in perfect sync with your BR's audio tracks. Of course, when you're ready to do your final mix, you'll need to import the drum track to a pair of BR audio tracks so you can include your drums in the mix. But until then, you're free to edit your drum track on the computer as much as you like.

See pages 225 - 231 of the BR-1600 manual. And this Hydrogen page: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/node/5#sect.midi_actions

[leighelse]

Thank you @64Guitars for drawing my attention to the Beat Map. That's exactly what I need.

I may still use Hydrogen and Onyx in the future, but the Beat Map gets me moving again immediately.

::Leigh

[AndyR]

Yep, I've used the Beat Map successfully on the BR1600.

I was reading your post (I'm at work) thinking I'm sure I've done this and it was really easy as it turned out... I was dreading it when I first realised I needed it, but it was so easy I couldn't even remember how I did it... I'm SO glad 64G had already got the details for you!

[leighelse]

Thanks for your help @64Guitars and @AndyR.

I've advanced the song I'm working on by first creating a sketch in Onyx: that's quick and easy to do, and the backing track Onyx generates lets me hum through the song and confirm that what I've drafted is accurate. Plus it's easy to transpose and tweak the BPM if necessary, and test different accompaniment styles to spark some alternative ideas. The result of the Onyx sketch is:

• A full chord sheet mapped to bar numbers
• Time signature changes mapped to bar numbers
• Tempo changes mapped to bar numbers

It took fifteen minutes to sketch the song in Onyx, then about an hour to enter the data into a new song in the BR-1600 (three chord changes every two bars). Alternatively I could have imported the Onyx MIDI file into Hydrogen, but for now I want to get familiar with drum and chord programming in the BR-1600.

Good progress.

::Leigh