Ableton Forum

What do you guys use for sequencing beats... I like Redrum in Reason but its not worth me buying the product as that's all I'd use. Impulse is Cool but drawing in the beats is just painful, unless I'm missing something.

I need a good alternative. Mainly for programming house music loops.

Any Suggestions?

I just record the midi from a keyboard into live and then clean up the patterns afterwards by hand. Drawing beats in is as painful under live as it is in any other sequencer (especially reason's).

iDrum will do the job... (remember to click th e "i"nfo button to adjust pitch, decay and filter. But I just preffer impulse... anyway... idrum is a cheap and fair option...

idrum

cheers.

G.

keyboard, mainly and a korg EA-1 drumachine for recording the midi info and then tweaking / cleaning. that's how i work.

Multiple impulses each playing one type of sound, I play the drums live using keyboard and stuff that's not easy to play (like 32nds) I edit in the pianoroll, it's not making the basic beat that takes time, it's the fine tuning and the pianoroll is perfect for that.

I never saw much use for a specialised drum grid, it's just another way of representing the notes and inferior to using the pianoroll, I have all my drums set to gate mode so the note length defines the decay of the drumsound, for example a snare roll that speeds up I'll have long notes at the slow part and when it speeds up I shorten the notes from 16ths to 32nd note length so the roll is tighter, or say I have a clap with long reverb on, then I can use the note length to vary how much reverb tail is on the clap etc.. and a drumgrid makes it impossible to visualise your note lengths.

luke_l wrote:What do you guys use for sequencing beats... I like Redrum in Reason but its not worth me buying the product as that's all I'd use. Impulse is Cool but drawing in the beats is just painful, unless I'm missing something.

maybe you are missing something....
go to the midi channel impulse is on, record an empty 1 bar clip. Now while the empty clip is playing draw in the notes that trigger the drum sounds in impulse - I dont know off the top of my head since i dont use impulse, anyways once you've drawn in everynote that has a corresponding sound press the FOLD button to the top left of the piano-roll. This gets rid of every other note that's not in use, so all you are left with on your screen is a simple grid to draw your beats into ...... you can now delete the notes you initially drew and start fresh.

does that help ?

b0unce wrote:

luke_l wrote:What do you guys use for sequencing beats... I like Redrum in Reason but its not worth me buying the product as that's all I'd use. Impulse is Cool but drawing in the beats is just painful, unless I'm missing something.

maybe you are missing something....
go to the midi channel impulse is on, record an empty 1 bar clip. Now while the empty clip is playing draw in the notes that trigger the drum sounds in impulse - I dont know off the top of my head since i dont use impulse, anyways once you've drawn in everynote that has a corresponding sound press the FOLD button to the top left of the piano-roll. This gets rid of every other note that's not in use, so all you are left with on your screen is a simple grid to draw your beats into ...... you can now delete the notes you initially drew and start fresh.

does that help ?

The cool thing about impulse is that it already is folded to show just the notes that are used.


Make a one or two bar loop. Start the click track and then arm the track. Start hammering on your keyboard or other controller to get the notes recorded in. It will keep looping so you can get it down better as you warm up. Change up the quantization to make the notes quantize to smaller or larger increments. Mess with the velocities. Sometimes switching the pointer to the pencil tool can be a good way to quickly draw in notes as well.

hope that helps.

luke_l wrote:What do you guys use for sequencing beats... I like Redrum in Reason but its not worth me buying the product as that's all I'd use. Impulse is Cool but drawing in the beats is just painful, unless I'm missing something.

I need a good alternative. Mainly for programming house music loops.

Any Suggestions?

I use Redrum / NNXT / Impulse / Reaktor Groove Boxes / and Dimension Pro as it loads .rex files with drag and drop of midi files from the interface into LIVE
:D.
Of course owning Recycle helps :D.