How are you guys (and gals) using your Machinedrums?

[AK]

After spending some time just messing with it... i find that i only use it for the highhats and some snares. and maybe a couple toms... i'm really thinking about moving to a vermona drm1.

i've used it for bass stuff but when i start mixing those with the analogues it gets cloudy so i stopped doing that. I think if i were making strictly minimal i'd rethink how i was leveraging the lowend because you can make some extremely bouncy stuff with it.

Think outside the box?

Try writing a standard kick/hat, and a bass/few chords/whatever and leave the slate/background, empty. Then fill in the silence with interesting and evolving 'backdrops/percussion' etc with the MD.

I find you can give atomosphere and life to an otherwise standard idea. Dead silence behind a kick/bass/percussion pattern is just lazy and doesn't do anything interesting for me. But if tonal interest was there under it all, as a listener, I'd be more inclined to keep listening.

I think the MD is great for that additional tonal element, or underlying twisting of something that adds a certain magic to tracks.

I guess it depends on what sort of music you are doing, I see my MD as my go-to percussive and texture/rhythmic box and use it to support and add interest to ideas.

[hydrogen]

I'm using classic breaks as the tonal element. It can get really filled in otherwise! But whenever the techno comes around... This is exactly the thing to do AK, and machine drum fits the bill. The p-locks / LFOs are like magic.

But fck it... I'll give that exact process a go when I start my next tune.maybe I use less soul breaks as a result.

[Barfunkel]

After spending some time just messing with it... i find that i only use it for the highhats and some snares. and maybe a couple toms... i'm really thinking about moving to a vermona drm1.

And I'm moving from a Vermona to a Machinedrum. Don't get me wrong, I do like the Vermona, but it is quite limited, despite having all those knobs. The sweet spot is extremely narrow, thus making the ability to edit it kinda useless, as mosts sounds it can produce aren't really that usable. You could basically sample the best bits from it and move on, which is exactly what I plan on doing.

[AK]

After spending some time just messing with it... i find that i only use it for the highhats and some snares. and maybe a couple toms... i'm really thinking about moving to a vermona drm1.

And I'm moving from a Vermona to a Machinedrum. Don't get me wrong, I do like the Vermona, but it is quite limited, despite having all those knobs. The sweet spot is extremely narrow, thus making the ability to edit it kinda useless, as mosts sounds it can produce aren't really that usable. You could basically sample the best bits from it and move on, which is exactly what I plan on doing.

That's weird. Before buying the MD, I was looking at the Vermona as an option and a guy I know on MSN has one and told me the exact same thing. I was disappointed because I really wanted one.

[kdgh]

ever rushed some sounds through external effects?
yes the vermona itself might seem limited at some point, but you can create a new dimension by buying a mixer and use the sends.
Just buy a sample tape delay guitar pedal and a reverb pedal. believe me you'll get new sounds.

example :

i patch the clap on a channelstrip of a mixer, cut off the lowend and the high end and boost the mid intensely.
Give it a extra bit of rhythm by sending some subtle delay, et voila!

new sounds, same machine.

i also own the MachineDrum and i can tell those sounds are also limited, though with some external creativity you can create a whole new dimension of sounds.

[AK]

i also own the MachineDrum and i can tell those sounds are also limited

Hmm, not agreeing with that at all. The sound pallette of the MD is probably near infinite. How that comes under the term limited is beyond me.

[kdgh]

limited as in having a certain character.
Nothing weird, tho sometimes you might like something different

[AK]

Yeah, agree with you on that. There are definitely sounds you can make on it that wouldn't themselves be a typical md sound but then of course there are those that are instantly recognisable. Whether that's a good thing or not I don't know but obviously if you didn't like the sound you wouldn't buy it. I suppose the same could be said of absolutely everything. I don't think having a limited sound pallete is a bad thing as long as those sounds are good sounds. Look at the TR 808 / 909, you can't get more limited if you tried, way more limited than say the Vermona ( which I happen to really like btw ), yet they are the most sought after drum machines in history.

What I dislike about the md is that it doesn't really have anything to identify it - I guess that's kinda missing the point of it though to be fair but when I looked at the vermona as well as the md, I was after a drum synth, something where I could create my own interesting percussion and whatever else it might do. They are two different things really and the md fitted the bill for what I wanted so when I said limited, that's only in the area I would have been purchasing it for but soundwise, I prefer the Vermona.