Hi guys

I have Battery 3. I don't care about the sample library it comes with. I don't care about live playing. I like the reverb but its nothing I can't live without. I don't really use it for much besides triggering a sample.

That said, I do all that with Vember Audio Short Circuit 2. Quite comfortably too. I don't know why I need Battery 3 and and therefore thinking of selling it.

Before I do, am I missing something great about it that I have not realised yet?

Not really imo! I used Battery as my main drum sampler for years but it just offers so much stuff I don't need. I just want to play my damn drum samples

I now switched to Poise and couldn't be happier
It has a really fast workflow and offers everything I need and some more stuff like round robin etc.

Battery has some nice features like the articulations, the build in FX, the modulation routing etc. but I never really used these features.

Cheers
Dennis
Last edited by Bronto Scorpio on Tue Apr 10, 2012 3:19 pm; edited 1 time in total

I ditched Battery 3 for the most part after Ableton introduced Drum Racks. I still use it for some of the articulation stuff and because it's easy to build complex kits quickly.

If you are just loading samples to the pads and you aren't using any of the fancy features, I can't think of a compelling reason to keep it.

I was just looking at the specs wondering if I would use the sound stretch.
How far can it stretch?
I know, download the demo.
Just thought I'd bring it up, since this thread was happening anyway.

I'm a lot like you, I don't use the house kits unless I'm composing quickly(meaning I'll switch them out later with drums of my own...)
But, I find it really REALLY useful for making my own drum and FX kits. I do a lot of processing and resampling with just about everything and anything, and it really gels with my workflow. Now, it's the only drum machine I've ever really used, so I can't make fair comparisons.

- Corin

The range is 0.1% to 800%. 0.1% would be 1000x slower than the original speed and of course 800% would be 8x faster than the original speed.

For me the included Library is the main reason to keep it so if you're not using it, sell it. The reverb isn't that good. That said, I love the included library and I always find something interesting in it.

I'm not very familiar with SC2, so I don't know how it compares, but Battery has some excellent features for layering samples on one pad and/or across multiple pads.

Battery has vintage modes that emulate the SP-1200 and MPC60. First Maschine had it, then it was added to Battery in the 3.1 update, and then finally added to Kontakt 5. I used Battery as a "vintage" sampler until I picked up STX-1260. I ended up selling Battery as a result. It's up to you if you're into that.

I like Battery, it offers a lot of sound mangling tools, can also be used to create multi-sampled "non-drum" instruments and has a functional GUI that is easy to see and read.

In the Kit 01 in the file below, only 1 sample is used, I've used transposition, trimming of the start/end points, pitch envelopes, stretch engine and articulations (or combined these methods) to alter the playback of the original sample and thus create 32 different sounds.

http://www.lesproductionszvon.com/download/freebies/Zvon_LoF i_Kalimba.rar

Battery is my go to drum machine for sample based stuff.

You can use it at different levels, it very efficient to build simple kits on the fly, and you can make some in depth work if you want.

I never use the internal reverb except when I make demo and want to make sure people can get the exact same sound effortless, otherwise in prod I separate the outputs and use extenral verbs, so I wont comment on that.

I'm not missing the sequencer part because I always play the drums, on kbs or my Vdrums, but this can be something people need in a drum unit.

The only thing I would like is the ability to save Cells as groups of cells, and then beeing able to merge/replace the groups into an existing kit. The old DR-808 did that ages ago

If Battery had this additionnal feature I could not imagine needing another drum machine except for pure true synthesis engines ( like analog drum machine, hybrid FM etc )

This is interesting

http://vimeo.com/16202070

Battery 4, or its successor, could be out in September.

For me, the library is the main thing, but I've got so many other great kits that I really don't go to Battery much anymore.

What I DO use Battery for is a very easy interface for creating Kontakt instruments. Specifically, if I get a set of loops that I want to lay across the keyboard for easy triggering, I'll drag them into the very easy Battery UI. From there, you can save as a Kontakt instrument. Very useful.

It also has a good auto slicing feature.

Other than that, you're not missing much. IMHO, NI missed the boat quite a while ago by not including SOME kind of onboard sequencer that would have made it fun to get beats going in any of their great kits. Of course now that the Abby Road Drums and Studio Drummer products have built in beat libraries, I doubt Battery will progress to this. Hopefully, I'll be wrong (won't be the first time) but I sense they've gone in a different direction.

Cheers
-B

One plus for Battery and Kontakt:

Their sound engine passes samples bit transparent at unity gain.

The kits would be something i'd like, but only if I could use them in Poise