Hardware drum machine that speaks to Pro Tools?

[Beedster]

Folks, I am about to record some theme music for a series of podcasts and online educational programmes. I've used hardware drum machines in the past, and have recently been using a Beat Buddy, but these have been largely for live as opposed to recording applications. I've trialled a few virtual drum products but find them very hard to use, I like and am used to the feel and logic of hardware drum machines, I also seem to be a little prone to RIS in my wrist from excessive use of the mouse, so want to minimise mouse usage as far as possible. I'd like to find a decent hardware drum machine that will integrate as easily as possible with Pro Tools. I would also like one that can emulate real drum sounds as far as possible, I'm not really into 80's sounds! Lots of reviews out there seem to like the Arturia DrumBrute which seems reasonably priced, but of course the problem with hardware kits is that, unlike their virtual counterparts, you can't audition them first! Any thoughts/experience on this or others would be very welcome.

Thanks in advance

Chris

PS when I say 'speaks to' I mean can sync with or create a click in Pro Tools

Edited July 25, 2020 by Beedster

[Dad3353]

As drum machines go, the Arturia is a decent candidate. It has the advantage of having all the sounds already incorporated, and separate outputs for each part of the kit (assuming you want multi-track drum mixing..?). It has, of course, the disadvantages of drum machines, too, in that, if the sounds please, fine; if not, tough. It's not badly priced (I saw around the £300 mark..?).

Your choice, of course, but I'm puzzled as to what you're trying to do that can't be done with ease using Toontrack's EZ-Drummer 2 for half the price, though. Do you want to play 'hands on' with pads, or usepre-existing  MIDI tracks, or create tracks in 'piano-roll' style..? If you're not into EDM stuff, what style would best describe the drum stuff you need..? Curious..? Yes; I'm a drummer, and I'd like to understand what the issues are. 

[Nicko]

I have an old Boss DR 5 which is not a traditional drum machine and I've never really managed to programme it. I now use VST drums and the DR5 is redundant.  It has midi out but I don't know whether you can sync it in the way that you want.  You're welcome to give it a go, or look up the manual on line and see if it will do what you want, but my understanding is that you can use it as a midi controller to play a virtual set in the DAW while playing it like a drum machine.  The pads are really small though.

[Beedster]

20 minutes ago, Dad3353 said:

As drum machines go, the Arturia is a decent candidate. It has the advantage of having all the sounds already incorporated, and separate outputs for each part of the kit (assuming you want multi-track drum mixing..?). It has, of course, the disadvantages of drum machines, too, in that, if the sounds please, fine; if not, tough. It's not badly priced (I saw around the £300 mark..?).

Your choice, of course, but I'm puzzled as to what you're trying to do that can't be done with ease using Toontrack's EZ-Drummer 2 for half the price, though. Do you want to play 'hands on' with pads, or usepre-existing  MIDI tracks, or create tracks in 'piano-roll' style..? If you're not into EDM stuff, what style would best describe the drum stuff you need..? Curious..? Yes; I'm a drummer, and I'd like to understand what the issues are. 

Thanks Dad!

I'd like a drum machine that is operated like the machines I'm used to using and which I can use live if needs be (when I say 'live' I mean for practicing and rehearsing without needing a computer in the room, specifically for writing with bandmates of making music with the kids ahead of my 6-year old's inevitable journey towards a full kit), but which links with Pro Tools easily. I tried EZ Drummer and to be honest found it unintuitive, which is probably a major part of the problem - when it comes to drum simulation my brain appears formatted to fully understand the logic of old school hardware and not the current interfaces and protocols of the VSTs. Re playing, I'm not sure I fully understand the options above, but I think that yes, I'm looking to create tracks piano roll style, which is how I've always done it (and I have NEVER used midi, perhaps I need to get into it more). Re style, I'm mostly going to be wanting to create low key small/jazz kit type drum tracks at the moment (the stuff I'm writing for the theme music is drums, double bass and possibly a little bit of jingly-jangly telecaster), but of course, down the line I might also want to be creating 'In the Air Tonight' big kit sounds. 

If the consensus is that I'm shooting myself in the foot trying to avoid VSTs, then I will take that feedback and take the plunge, and perhaps use an old school 16 quarter-beat display drum machine with the kids and to rehearse. However I'd prefer the same machine does both if possible

Thanks for your help

Chris

[Beedster]

29 minutes ago, Nicko said:

I have an old Boss DR 5 which is not a traditional drum machine and I've never really managed to programme it. I now use VST drums and the DR5 is redundant.  It has midi out but I don't know whether you can sync it in the way that you want.  You're welcome to give it a go, or look up the manual on line and see if it will do what you want, but my understanding is that you can use it as a midi controller to play a virtual set in the DAW while playing it like a drum machine.  The pads are really small though.

Hi Nicko, much appreciated, many thanks. I'll take a look at the manual and online stuff and get back to you. Any device with midi will sync with Pro Tools I imagine, I think that some - especially more recent models - do it more seemlessly than others (I might be wrong, as I said above, I've never really used midi).

Thanks for your help

Chris

[BigRedX]

If you are looking for something that can be used as a completely stand-alone device, but will run in sync with ProTools on your computer, the essential piece of jargon to look out for is MIDI Time Code (MTC). This will allow your drum machine to synchronise exactly to your ProTools session and to pickup (within a bar at worst) from any point in the song you start recording or playback. 

Any drum machine made in the last 20 years should understand and respond to MTC, although it might not be enabled by default. You will need to check the MIDI implementation chart in the device's manual to make certain that MTC is available and how to enable it if necessary. It is not the same as MIDI sync which is much more primitive and probably won't be comprehensive enough for your needs.

You will also need to make sure that your MIDI interface will transmit MTC. Because it is quite data-intensive (in MIDI bandwidth terms), budget interfaces may not transmit MTC, and most of those that do will have it disabled by default. Again check the manual. 

Also you need to check the timing offset capabilities. This is how you tell each device where the beginning of the song is in relation to MTC. Some devices/DAWs are not happy with 00:00:00:00 being the start point of the song. Others may demand that it is. Make sure that if one device insists on starting at a particular MTC value the other one is happy with that value as a starting point too.

The other thing to think about is if your songs have tempo and time signature changes. These will need to be programmed separately into your drum machine and ProTools session. The drum machine may well not have all the nuances of timing and dynamics that a good computer DAW has, so what you can do in terms of tempos and time signatures will be limited to what the drum machine is capable of.

HTH.

Edited July 27, 2020 by BigRedX

[Dad3353]

This ^^ is excellent gen from One Who Knows. Good Stuff, BRX. 

[Beedster]

19 hours ago, BigRedX said:

If you are looking for something that can be used as a completely stand-alone device, but will run in sync with ProTools on your computer, the essential piece of jargon to look out for is MIDI Time Code (MTC). This will allow your drum machine to synchronise exactly to your ProTools session and to pickup (within a bar at worst) from any point in the song you start recording or playback. 

Any drum machine made in the last 20 years should understand and respond to MTC, although it might not be enabled by default. You will need to check the MIDI implementation chart in the device's manual to make certain that MTC is available and how to enable it if necessary. It is not the same as MIDI sync which is much more primitive and probably won't be comprehensive enough for your needs.

You will also need to make sure that your MIDI interface will transmit MTC. Because it is quite data-intensive (in MIDI bandwidth terms), budget interfaces may not transmit MTC, and most of those that do will have it disabled by default. Again check the manual. 

Also you need to check the timing offset capabilities. This is how you tell each device where the beginning of the song is in relation to MTC. Some devices/DAWs are not happy with 00:00:00:00 being the start point of the song. Others may demand that it is. Make sure that if one device insists on starting at a particular MTC value the other one is happy with that value as a starting point too.

The other thing to think about is if your songs have tempo and time signature changes. These will need to be programmed separately into your drum machine and ProTools session. The drum machine may well not have all the nuances of timing and dynamics that a good computer DAW has, so what you can do in terms of tempos and time signatures will be limited to what the drum machine is capable of.

HTH.

Many thanks BRX, that's really helpful. I'm 99% there with the DrumBrute https://www.arturia.com/drumbrute/overview, which seems to be a great price for a unit that consistently appears in Top-10 lists, and which has an interface that my 80's formatted brain will get on with (I spent a lot of the '80s playing with a Roland 606, and then - appalling I know -  added the 303 when I moved from bass to sax for a few years). Any thoughts you have on the DrumBrute would be most welcome.

Thanks again, really useful advice

[BigRedX]

TBH I moved from external MIDI hardware to being "In The Box" 20 years ago so I'm not really up with abilities of the current crop of drum machines.

One thing that I will say, is look very carefully at how much memory they have - especially if you you hope to have very complex drum parts or more than one song programmed up at once. The DrumBrute says it has 64 patterns - make sure that is 64 patterns no matter how "busy" they are. I used to own a Yamaha RX11 which boasted up to 99 patterns, but the reality was, that if your drum parts were complex it would run out of memory long before it ran out of available patterns.

Also 64 patterns don't go a long way if you want to have more than one song in memory. For a typical song you might have 1 pattern for the verse, 1 for the chorus, 1 for the "middle 8", maybe 1 for each of the intro and the outro, and then at least one fill option for each pattern. That's probably 10 patterns for a rhythmically simple song - and much more if you are going for a "realistic" drum part.

In the studio this doesn't matter as you can save the memory contents to your computer (hopefully) and load up each song as required. If you want to use it live, though you may need to do some fancy lateral thinking to get a set's worth of songs out of 64 patterns. Audiences these days are not going to want to wait while you load up the next song into your drum machine. We didn't in the 80s either, but back then unless you had very expensive kit, there was no option.

Finally think about the drum sounds you want. Are you after something that sounds like real drums being played by a real drummer, or weird electronic sounds and rhythms? I spent much of the 80s trying to make the various drum machine I owned - Boss DR55, Roland 808, Yamaha RX11 sound like acoustic drums. When I finally got a device with much more realistic sounds (an Alesis HR16) I then joined a band which had a drummer, and then was trying to make it sound electronic so that it would contrast properly with real drums sounds!

Edited July 28, 2020 by BigRedX

[Beedster]

On 28/07/2020 at 10:47, BigRedX said:

TBH I moved from external MIDI hardware to being "In The Box" 20 years ago so I'm not really up with abilities of the current crop of drum machines.

One thing that I will say, is look very carefully at how much memory they have - especially if you you hope to have very complex drum parts or more than one song programmed up at once. The DrumBrute says it has 64 patterns - make sure that is 64 patterns no matter how "busy" they are. I used to own a Yamaha RX11 which boasted up to 99 patterns, but the reality was, that if your drum parts were complex it would run out of memory long before it ran out of available patterns.

Also 64 patterns don't go a long way if you want to have more than one song in memory. For a typical song you might have 1 pattern for the verse, 1 for the chorus, 1 for the "middle 8", maybe 1 for each of the intro and the outro, and then at least one fill option for each pattern. That's probably 10 patterns for a rhythmically simple song - and much more if you are going for a "realistic" drum part.

In the studio this doesn't matter as you can save the memory contents to your computer (hopefully) and load up each song as required. If you want to use it live, though you may need to do some fancy lateral thinking to get a set's worth of songs out of 64 patterns. Audiences these days are not going to want to wait while you load up the next song into your drum machine. We didn't in the 80s either, but back then unless you had very expensive kit, there was no option.

Finally think about the drum sounds you want. Are you after something that sounds like real drums being played by a real drummer, or weird electronic sounds and rhythms? I spent much of the 80s trying to make the various drum machine I owned - Boss DR55, Roland 808, Yamaha RX11 sound like acoustic drums. When I finally got a device with much more realistic sounds (an Alesis HR16) I then joined a band which had a drummer, and then was trying to make it sound electronic so that it would contrast properly with real drums sounds!

That was great advice BRX, many thanks. My main issue over and above the tech is a somewhat restricted budget, which is pretty much the cash I pulled in by selling my PJB Bighead and Beat Buddy recently (around £400), which limits the functionality to a degree. DrumBrute is still looking like the best option at present?