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What would be a good drum machine that can be programed for full songs

Eddie M

Eddie M

Guest
Jan 5, 2018
37
20
Gulf Shores AL
myfamilybeachportraits.com
#1
Hi What would be good drum machine that can be programmed to play a full song with drum fills and so on? That won't cost too much. Would like to be able to get a double bass drum sound as well for heavy songs.

I would like to play around making things up and have a drum track i set up with fills and everything for bass drum songs I make.
I have not looked at drum machines in years can they do this for a full song or do i need to go to a PC software based system?

Recommendations and links to them would be great.

Thanks
 
#3
IME one of the easiest ways to create MIDI drum tracks for loops and full songs is to use a PC and a DAW. Presonus has a DAW called Studio One 3 Artist. It comes free with their interfaces. It's not a free trial version but a full on DAW. With that you can use the myrid of drum loops or create your own MIDI drum track with a keyboard controller. Real easy to do, and the results are very good once you get use to creating your tracks.

Here's a cinematic track I created using the MIDI drum feature and some of the synth loops in Studio One 3:
 
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#4
Hydrogen has a windows version, it is song oriented and very easy to use.
You can download from here:
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I'll advice to download a drumkit so it doesn't sound like an 8 bit nightmare and once you have your song ready export as midi file and use your favourite drum vst with it.
 
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#5
If you have a computer you might want to think about something like EZdrummer. It has a standalone mode, or you arrange you tracks in a DAW, like Reaper. I find the visual interface easy to work with, especially if I'm editing the raw midi tracks. When done just render to an audio file. Multiple drum kits, lots of intros, outros, fills, verse, chorus. Third party stuff available.
 
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#10
If you have a Mac, Logic Pro X/GarageBand has Smart Drummers, which are simply amazing. You choose a "drummer" based on what kind of genre and feel you're going for. Then, you choose which drums to play a certain number of measures for, as in bass, snare, toms, hi-hats, or cymbals. Then, you choose between various patterns, add swing and fills. How loud, how complicated. Then, you can divide them up by part and then the drummer magically generates a reasonable pattern to work with. It sounds very organic, not robotic or repetitive at all because the smart drummer keeps to the spirit of what you asked for while adding small changes. If, after all of this, you want to have more control over what the smart drummer is doing, or you like it but want to vary a couple measures, you can export the whole thing to a MIDI track and edit the track.

I've never found another drum machine that gets to this level of useful with so little work. It even can even give a real drummer some good ideas.
 

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