How to get real sounding drums from drum machine presets: an Alesis sr-18 preview UPDATE

Back in April, I wrote a blog about getting decent drum sounds out of a drum machine,which I have reprinted below.However,I made some discoveries that really should be mentioned.First, After having worked with both the Alesis sr-16 and the Alesis sr-18, there is no question that the Alesis sr-18 sounds better. It rivals drum samples and even cymbals sound real.The sr-16 cymbals were quite weak.

Here are a few tips that I ran across to make the drum machine sound realistic in your recordings or live.

First, the sr-18 has three different sounds in a preset, drums, percussion and bass. I highly recommend muting the bass out completely , it sounds lousy.Secondly, mute the percussion as well in most presets. The reason for this is that it usually contains hand claps, little bells, shakers and other noises that just aren't usually associated with a drum kit.


Now , for the most important tip and to be filed in the 'now you tell me department'. Select a pattern and then go into the drum machine setup and there you can change the drum kit associated with presets. There are quite a few drum kits and it is amazing what a difference that a drum kit will make.It can take a useless sounding preset and make it really sound realistic and useful. For example,I particularly like drum kit 70 and I tried it on a lot of different presets .The drum sound overall stays the same but it plays different patterns. Great for recording an album.Most bands don't use a different drum kit for each track on an album,but rather one kit with different patterns.

By the way, Drum kits on the sr-16 can also be chosen but they are more limited in sound than the sr-18.

original article
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For home recording enthusiasts ,getting realistic drum sounds has always been a pain in the butt. Access to a drummer and recording a drum kit is a daunting process for most musicians bedroom studio's. Also, if your not a drummer, how can you program custom drum sounds on a drum machine?!

For me as A non drummer who doesn't program drum machines with much success I rely on the presets. I got an Alesis SR-18 with a lot of presets,but even more importantly , a lot of different sounding drum kits that can be used on any of the presets.

For recordings late at night , the simplicity of a drum machine was just right and the drum sounds of the SR-18 are every bit as good as session drummer 2 and similar programs. Using the kits to change the sound of the presets is crucial for recording. Also, the drum machine has a swing setting that can humanize the drum playing a bit.Use the fills sparingly 

 and don't try to get the Neil Pert Phil Collins and Keith Moon mountain sized drum fills as they wills tick out too much as unnatural.but some fills is helpful to break up the monotonous.

 Also.Also, a fun tip is to take a preset and create a user preset of the original preset and then you can take out a one of the drums to create variations on the preset pattern.Though, for most non drummers like me, just changing the drum kit makes a huge difference to the presets.

Adding some reverb F/X and sometimes some delay to the presets can yield interesting results. as well.The SR-18 has some built in reverbs,but an external unit can be very helpful.

Also, if your playing while recording , get a set of pedals to start/stop the drum machine and a pedal for fills. its a blast to hit a fill pedal and it will play a fill from the beginning or where ever you are in a musical time (4/4,etc..). the presets on the SR-18 are broken up into A/B variations and and a/B fills.

 interestingly the presets are setup in a 16 bar sequence. I much prefer the SR-16 in this respect, that was setup for 4/4 time which works great for rocks.The fills are more immediate. the solution then is to midi an SR-16 to trigger the SR-18 sounds which sound much better.

Also, for a few bucks , many drummers would create some cool custom user patterns for you. I had a drummer friend who did this for me for free and in no time I had many usable user preset patterns that were vastly superior to my feeble attempts.But if your going to ask a drummer to do this, make sure you are familiar with the sr-18 as far as getting  into programming mode and so on or else a simple task will discourage the drummer from messing with it.
anyway, I have used the SR-18 live and on albums with much success. Don't listen to these saps who say well drum machines aren't 'real' drums. the SR-18 samples are 'real drum'' samples. Its the next best thing to having a real drummer  available at all times. Listen to Joe Satriani's surfing with the aliens album where most of the drums are most definitely drum machines.

The SR-18 has some really great drum sounds!!
Denis Taaffe
denis@dtguitar.com
http://www,dtguitar.com