Best "bang for the buck" drum machine

TranceAddict Forums (www.tranceaddict.com/forums)
- Production Studio
-- Best "bang for the buck" drum machine

Posted by Stephen Wiley on Apr-04-2009 04:57:

Best "bang for the buck" drum machine

I'm in the market to buy a drum machine. I just need my drums and percussion to be hands on, period! I have looked at the new "MASCHINE" by NI but it's too expensive (it looks nice as hell though and has tons of samples and allows you to edit the wave in the machine!.)

Ideally, I'd like something with a good amount of solid presets and built in FX (solid ones) that is easy, practical, and reliable.

Bells & whistles are not important to me, other than the presets and FX.

Suggestions? (This is for Progressive Trance production)

Posted by cryophonik on Apr-04-2009 05:17:

Battery 3 is excellent and is 1/2 off ($99!) through the end of April. I just don't think you can go wrong there, but it does contain a bunch of kits/samples (e.g., reggae, jazz) that you'll probably never touch, unless you venture off into other genres. It does come with some decent electronic kits (e.g., 808, 909, trance, house), but I use it almost exclusively with Vengeance, Icone, Zennhiser, etc. one-shots and build my own kits.

I also use Stylus RMX extensively and bought Guru recently. Both are great - Stylus is excellent for layering REX-based patterns, but also has a ton of cool features for mangling them. It also works great for triggering one-shots, although it seems that most people aren't aware of this capability and write it off as a just a loop player - big oversight IMO. Guru is very flexible and is the machine that BPM and Maschine essentially ripped off. Guru comes with a pretty good library and has an awesome built-in step sequencer, but it has a pretty ugly and small GUI, which makes it kinda difficult to work with. Download the demo and check it out, though, I think you'll be impressed. Also, Guru 2 is expected sometime in the coming months and will supposedly implement a buttload of new features and an improved GUI/workflow.

Posted by cryophonik on Apr-04-2009 05:23:

I forgot to mention that all three of those drum VSTs come with very good effects, but I'd have to say that Stylus RMX has the highest quality effects overall and particularly the reverbs and compression.

All three have very good filters, but I like the sound of Battery 3's the best, followed by Stylus RMX.

Battery 3 and, to a lesser extent, Guru, have excellent WAV editing capabilities.

Posted by atxbigballer1 on Apr-04-2009 05:32:

Hardware
Roland mc-303 groovebox
Roland 505 /d2 groovebox
Akai mpc 1000
The Machinedrum SPS-1UW MKII
------------------
Software
Rebirth (its free)
Redrum

Posted by DJ RANN on Apr-04-2009 22:54:

That battery deal is great.

Best value for hardware?

Any of the Electribes. You can literally pick up the older ones second hand for for around $70!!! The mx sounds a bit dated, but the ES (sampler) can have any sounds loaded in to them that you want. I still use mine for creating loops - nothing lets me build and play with a loop faster, and nothing come close in terms of fun. Can lose hours just playing with them.

The EA is good for melody parts, pads, basslines, leads and even though some of it sounds dated, so much is user tweakable that they can sound really fresh too.

Get the an old ES-1 if you want to just do percussion loops - you won;t be able to have more fun with any piece of kit, and at $70 (I got lucky with mine and got it for $50!!) you can't really go wrong.

Posted by Zak McKracken on Apr-06-2009 20:28:

i can only recomend one and its machinedrum, while the electribes are fun their pretty useless compared to software.

Posted by cronodevir on Apr-06-2009 20:46:

909