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This machine is well under-rated by everyone here, and elsewhere. I just picked one up for 30 quid and once I'd replaced the data slider pot (this was v.easy to do) it was sorted. The sounds are well old skool and elektro, esp. thru some gated reverb. Thru my home-made distortion, it busts ass. The kicks are the main let down. Only one of the three available sounds is any good, and it doesn't have much low end at all, but then what digital drum machine kicks do? The claps are both lovely. And someone here said the cymbals are crap - not true! The closed hats are really crunchy and 'ticky', the ride is really nice and the crash is wild, esp. through distortion/feedback, which makes it sound like a psychotic horse going ape-shit. Also excellent is the ability to set the volume, pan and accent level separately for each sound, and of course the individual outs (if you have enough mixer channels free, that is).
The sequencer is super-intuitive and very flexible - anyone who says otherwise really doesn't know much about music machines. The quantise is super flexible so you can make some insane rushes and do wicked glitch retriggering. Also excellent is the ability to set the bar length and time sig of patterns to pretty much whatever you want. This makes it far more flexible than the TR series matrix, which pretty much restricts you to 4/4.
The icing on the cake is the MIDI spec, which is basic but just enough to be really useful. It syncs, but better still each of the sounds can be triggered by notes so you can use a computer sequencer to do really insane stuff. And the sync enables you to play stuff from an external sequencer on top patterns from the built in seq. Nice! But better still, it also sends out note data for each drum hit, so you can use it to trigger other stuff. An example: double the kick with a beefy analogue one. Or zero the volume of some of the less good sounds (e.g. the toms) and use those pads as external note triggers. The only thing it won't seem to do is record external sequences into the internal seq, which is a shame.
So - a great bargain drum machine with a really professional spec for the price. If you see one cheap and you know your arse from your elbow, you'll definitely want to buy this.
FBR
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