Although some producers prefer the superiority of syncing drum samples to audio tracks, the ease and creativity that sample-based drum machines offer are undeniable. Drum machines can benefit music producers in so many ways. Learn more about it at rapreviews.com. A drum machine can even create a certain beat loop and help rappers to practice rapping. Among many, I’ve listed the three most popular sample-based drum machines. To be clear, we’re referring to universal drum players and drum samples, not realistic emulations of acoustic drums.
Xfer Records Nerve
There’s more to Xfer Records than whey. Its beautiful drum machine predates the Uber synthesizer by half a century, as the old GUI suggests. Visual appearance is not deceiving. Nerve is a powerful beat production system with 16 pads that can hold a single sample or loop. These can be shaped with an intuitive graphical envelope and processed in every way imaginable with 22 PreCalc effects. It includes everything from pitch shifting, distortion, subharmonic synth, and ring modulation. You can also do filtering, loop cutting, step sequencing, and LFO modulation. 2 GB of large samples are included.
Native Instruments Battery 4
Battery 4, the “serious” sample-based software drum instrument, is still very popular. It has no onboard sequencing. Instead, it’s all about trancing, editing, and mixing samples for MIDI triggering in standalone and DAW modes. Each of the 128 colorable “cells” (pads) contains one or more velocity-sensitive samples. It allows for a wide variety of editing and processing parameters, such as compression, transient shaping and EQ, filtering, tuning and panning, modulation, filtering, time-stretching, and saturation. Each cell can output to one of four group buses or 32 direct outputs for shared processing.
It can also send to global reverb and delay effects and affect speed. A variety of MIDI processors allow automatic triggering of drum rudiments and other articulations and pan and pan tuning. Battery 4 improves on previous iterations and is a richly layered virtual drum/percussion system that is a real pleasure to use. You can also expand beyond the main sound library and your samples with NI’s growing selection of genre-based expansions.
FXpansion Geist 2
FXpansion’s MPC-inspired workstation has enough sequencing, sampling and processing power to produce complete tracks independently. However, the machine’s main purpose is to create beats and grooves. Geist 2’s hierarchical architecture allows eight “engines” to run simultaneously. Each of them is an instance of the complete instrument. The 64 pads can hold up to eight samples, each with velocity layering, random/round triggers, and loop slicers that assign slices across the pads.