Hello
Interested in opinions on, or examples of use of, the Machinedrum UW for genres that aren’t exclusively electronic. Whilst electronic drums appear in rock, pop, funk, disco, reggae etc; acoustic kits dominate.
I see two aspects of the machine as relevant in particular. First, the UW function. Second, the physical modeling MD synths.
I found these demos and I’m hearing a lot of non-electronic sounds and styles working really well.
So, does the Machinedrum cut it with non-electronic genres?
I use it in a country / rock band as my kick drum only. I use an acoustic snare and cymbal, with a crappy pair of headphones run into the audio input as audio trigger. So I’m not using the sequencer or p-locks at all, but it works really well for this.
I almost never use the Physical Modelling instruments as I just don’t think they get a good realistic sound - I’ll layer samples for that.
The lack of micro-timing means that while the sounds can be more acoustic, you’ll always be locked to that quantized grid.
Swing helps, but micro timing would take it much further.
I’d recommend Rytm for non-electronic styles. It has a larger sample memory per snapshot (project), and higher sample resolution. Micro timing and trig conditions are great ways to vary the sequence and push it more toward a human sound.
You can fake micro-timing by putting silence at the front of your samples and then adjusting the Start. However, this will only let you make a sound start late. To make it sound before the beat, you would have to make it really “late” if you follow me. Yeah it’s fiddly but it is possible. Microtiming would obviously be better.
Check out the ghost snares video for MD for some nice humanizing.
And there’s always the “send stuff into a slightly off time delay” trick and the “resample the loop, EQ it hard to isolate something, and play it back a slight speed difference” trick. Re-sampling the loop is a really great MD thickener IMO.