Who will succeed late Tremor?

[Stefken]

For your info.

Some might find the patdrummer sequencer interesting.

http://fabriziopoce.com/GrooveBox64.html

[emef]

sure Tremor will work great for years to come, i still use DR008 fine in windows 7

[Lotuzia]

XOX sequencers make no sense to me at all, unless it's on hardware.
There's nothing I can do in a 'drum sequencer' that I can't do in a piano roll.
Each to their own, but i LOVE drum machines, and StiX just didn't really do anything for me.
The sound was a bit lacking, i felt. and the GUI is also a bit confusing.
I will re-visit it though. One day.

Everyone has their own workflow, so i'm not arguing that drum sequencers are better for some people. They just don't really do much for me.
I like using the Tempest, generally, but a lot of the drum sequencers out there just feel like i'm walking backwards.

Yes , it's typically similar to hw machines like the tr-808/909 etc. Except it can be much more advanced nowadays. There are things that certain drum sequencers can do that can't be done in the piano roll, and even sometimes that can't be done using all daws regular tools as well, but I won't extrapolate on this because it's a too long and different subject.

However I'd like to point out one thing that might not interest all users, but a certain part of them, included advanced users, like your humble me : Drum Patterns as starting blocks and instantaneous idea triggers, or support. If I need a good drum pattern in style X, it takes one second to load it. It's in any case much faster than writing it in the piano roll, or any drum editor. So it can act as an editable support for a track (I load a pretty standard pattern that I can afterwards edit and change easily), or, in other cases, triggers my imagination because .. it grooves. In both case, I can play the other instruments at once. If you compare that to : write several bars in the piano rolls, then build a drumkit that fits etc etc, even if you're very skilled and fast, it's much faster. So, faster is not necessarily better, we agree. But you might have saved the energy, freshness, and spontaneity that could have been lost during the process of the drum track building.

Then, all people are not equally gifted when it comes to drums. A lot will appreciate to have ready made rythms in as many genres as possible as a basis for their tracks, because it will take them a long time to achieve the same results, and possibly, in the worst case, they wont be able to achieve it. And well, this is typically what drum machines offer since the very beginning (Remember Waltz, tango, cha-cha, rock 1/2, Disco, etc)

This is what I especially like in drum machines. I can write any drumtrack very quickly because well, I've studied drums when younger, but the ability to have a rythm in one second. Wow, it never ceased to ravish me. It's just wonderfull.

Now, I also agree that using XOX based machines to perform certain tasks, like a long and complex fusion/progrock piece, or simply completely natural sounding drums, might not be the best idea. Or that people can prefer other types of sequencers or drumgrids that fit their needs and workflow better.

[nilhartman]

I'm confident AudioSpillage will eventually release a fantastic DrumSpillage update and/or new plugin. I still haven't found anything to replace it.

Really looking forward to whatever u-he's cooking though.

[Distorted Horizon]

Really looking forward to whatever u-he's cooking though.

[sqigls]

you might think it's instantaneous. but in the end, you're either doing a cookie cutter (maybe genres are your thing fair enough) or you're settling for something, or you're sitting there tapping an arrow key or browsing. It all sounds a bit mechanical to me.

i really don't get the "time saving" argument. It will take me all of 10 seconds to get the basic beat out of my head. With a bit of groove. In that time you've navigated to your MIDI beat folder or whatever, browsed a few beats and settled for something, dragged it into your synth or whatever... and taken about the same amount of time. so either you're gonna load the same pattern for every song, or you're gonna flip through any given number of beats auditioning them... which takes time... when I'm writing a track, I sit down with a beat in my head, it's out in a few seconds. DONE. didn't sit there tapping an arrow key looking for some pre-existing thing... adjust a few parameters, a bit of swing or whatever, BAM, an original beat, that expresses how i feel at that time...


anyways, I have billions of bytes of beats, if i need to go down that route. Most MIDI recorded by professional drummers, with natural swing and feel etc... like I say, i can appreciate the timing and feel of some old boxes, the MPCs and such - they have their own sought after magic, but i'm a drummer myself, so I bet I can extract a groove from my head onto a piano roll (or definitely onto the Tempest) quicker than the average Joe can drag and drop whatever style they've decided they want onto the drum sequencer.

Time and a place for every interface.

[Lotuzia]

you might think it's instantaneous. but in the end, you're either doing a cookie cutter (maybe genres are your thing fair enough) or you're settling for something, or you're sitting there tapping an arrow key or browsing. It all sounds a bit mechanical to me.

i really don't get the "time saving" argument. It will take me all of 10 seconds to get the basic beat out of my head. With a bit of groove. In that time you've navigated to your MIDI beat folder or whatever, browsed a few beats and settled for something, dragged it into your synth or whatever... and taken about the same amount of time. so either you're gonna load the same pattern for every song, or you're gonna flip through any given number of beats auditioning them... which takes time... when I'm writing a track, I sit down with a beat in my head, it's out in a few seconds. DONE. didn't sit there tapping an arrow key looking for some pre-existing thing... adjust a few parameters, a bit of swing or whatever, BAM, an original beat, that expresses how i feel at that time...


anyways, I have billions of bytes of beats, if i need to go down that route. Most MIDI recorded by professional drummers, with natural swing and feel etc... like I say, i can appreciate the timing and feel of some old boxes, the MPCs and such - they have their own sought after magic, but i'm a drummer myself, so I bet I can extract a groove from my head onto a piano roll (or definitely onto the Tempest) quicker than the average Joe can drag and drop whatever style they've decided they want onto the drum sequencer.

Time and a place for every interface.

Well I'm obliged to refer to StiX to explain a few things, sorry for that. A global preset includes up to 12 different patterns, a drumkit, the mixer + fx, and all 10 drumpads with their macros and plethora of parameters, and the patterns with P.locks etc and .... a multicriteria search engine. (By BPM, genre, type, author, binary/ternary, swing or not etc). So if I need say a Lounge pattern circa 90-95 BPM etc, I'm only a few clicks (setting criterias) from a selection of collection of patterns wich should get me more/less where I want. A single click, and it's all there : Main patterns, variations, breaks, fills etc. And I can still modify anything very quickly. Or randomize the drumkits. Or randomise individual sequence lines. I can build a whole drumtrack in one pass with all the above by chaining patterns live with the midi keyboard, while muting some sounds with the midi keyboard here and there, and playing manual breaks if desired, always from the midi keyboard.

It's in that sense, that I said it's extremely fast. possibly inspiring, and possibly helpful as well.

This said it won't replace a system like a midifile played live by a -good to god- drummer. This is definitely something else, I agree. (otoh very sophisticated drum arrangements are also difficult to use, except if you play the same exact song they were recorded for) And it's not in any case faster than sitting behind your e.drumkit and record live the whole track (Wich I sometimes do as well) It's something else, but that can be very rewarding, even for me who can play/record drums or write sophisticated parts on the fly because well, I spent a lot of time with drums in my life. But anyway, like I said XOX sequencer and/or drum machines themselves are just a part of the whole colourful percussion/drums world, and there are indeed many different paths that can lead to beautiful and groovy tracks.

[Kamikaze Coda]

I'm sure u-He's upcoming drum synth will take Tremor out. I don't understand FXpansion and why they let their products rot...

Wait... U-he is making a drum synth?

Same rection, here... I didn't know. I found a link to that video in another kvr thread :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh7n1BBeeiU

Great! With a Tremor-like sequencer, and a ton of good presets and kits, it will be the thing I'm dying for.

Seems to be a based on physical modeling of (it's not sample based) real drums instead of drum synths. More akin to Chromaphone or a drum kit, than Tremor.