Not sure if this is the right forum for this question, if not let me know where it should go.

Now that I received many good answers to drum synths and samplers to use, I've become kind of fond of the DR008. My question has to do with how to program drum parts into a sequencer in general. I'm from the old drum machine school, programming patterns and fills then throwing them together into songs. Up until now, that's the way I've done it. Just kick off the song from the PC to the drum machine and record the audio.

On the PC side it seems like a real pain to sit down with my MIDI controller and tap in the entire song, yes? Is this the whole thing behind loops? I've tried Fruity Loops before, but never really took the time to figure it out.

Any thoughts, opinions and pointers are most welcome.

Thanks,

youngd

you can do it the way your used to...you could even export the midi file from your drumachine into any midi sequencer

or you could do it the step way, that is doing like you do on a normal drum machine, only you can freely draw it(cubase's "drum edit")

or the midi recording perfromance way(keyboards , akai drums squares or full midi drum pads like the pros use)

depedens on which host your using and the way you prefer and is speedy enough for you

I suggest reading the manual(cubase,logic,orion,etc)

What I usually do is this (but hey, don't take it too serious, I'm a rather oldfashioned dude it seems):
-Layout a rough drumtrack. I usually record that one in realtime, that way I allways have some slight dynamic variations which are welcome. I'm using my left hand for kick and snare, right hand for the hats or cymbals. Most often these patterns are around 2-8 beats in length.
- I loop them all throughout the song while I'm working on other parts (piece of cake in Logic as you just press L and the part will repeat until eternity).
- When done with most of the other parts I may think about finetuning the drum part. That might include adding variations of the pattern, rolls, doublestrokes, ghost notes and so on.
- I may now alter some sounds. Usually it's the snares that I'm most concerned about. But well, sometimes I also do that in the first place.
- Oh, and I often tend to record a shaker manually (a real shaker that is), to give some human element to my otherwise quantized grooves. This is working very nice IMO.

When it comes to electronic-ish music (certainly not my game), I may often use other tactics as well, such as programming the complete thing. I don't have any problems using Logic's Matrix (AKA piano roll, key edit), but I agree that regarding this programs such as Fruity Loops may offer more intuitive methods. Also the stepsequencer included in the DR008 is something worth trying for such things.

Sascha