Drum Machine

steve-t

Hello Peter. I have been using your stage traxx 3 for some years now and it is excellent.
I have a request and a possible idea for you.
So, I changed my style a couple of years ago to acoustic guitar and a drum machine and didn’t do very much ‘backing track’ style singing but occasionally towards the end of the night it did help to include a few ‘full backing’ songs for the finale.
To this end I had to have a drum machine and the ipad with me to cover both styles.
Then a year ago I had the idea to make 5 minute drum loops and put them into stage traxx and it works quite good so now I only need to take the ipad.
Ok, one small problem that I have is on the stop/start footswitch function.
When there is a gap in the song and I press stop and then start, it does not come back on the beat because of course I stopped it on the beat.
Is it possible that you can add a ‘back to start’ on the stop function in the ‘Settings / assign actions’
Then the idea for you is that possibly you could add and promote this ‘drum machine function to the stage traxx capabilities. Thanks. Steve

Damir

steve-t I totally agree not only for drum machine but a lot of the time I stop the playback to involve the crowd only and now we will have the visual click which is fantastic but as you said it would be great if the closest loop point is auto cued so you can immediately start on the beginning of that loop point when you get back to play , at the moment I hit stop then I have to choose the loop again while involving the crowd, it’s quite a job while it would be real easy if the beginning of loop was auto selected and you just hit start .

peter

OK, so there is already a stop mode called "Rewind" (in Settings > Playback Settings). If you select that, the playhead will jump back to the beginning of a song when you pause playback during a song.

Then version 3.8 will have the feature to only stop playback at the end of an audio region. Usually your regions start and end on a full measure, so with that function when you hit play again, you will be at the beginning of a new measure.

And then you have the option Damir described. Just tap on an audio region and the playhead will be placed at the beginning of that region.

steve-t

ahh - ok - I will try that - in the first message I meant to say I made a 'drum only' 5 min backing track and not a drum 'loop'

Damir

steve-t ahh - ok - I will try that - in the first message I meant to say I made a 'drum only' 5 min backing track and not a drum 'loop'

You can do a lot more very simply by recording a drum peace that contains into, verse beat chorus beat, solo beat, break beat , variation beat and so on string them all in to one recording in the order you prefer and have them only a few bars each , then create audio segments and place them on permanent loop as default apart from the fills and you have a perfect drum machine where you simply hit start the intro drum beat plays through and goes to your firs beat you foot control to disable the permanent loop it plays through the fill which does not have permanent loop and play through to your new variation which than stays on repeating till you move on again , you can manoeuvre around all the beat segments till the cows come home then choose the ending beat, Shalla you have a perfect drummer with easy control that’s actually much better than most drum machines on the market you just have to do the preparations of all your beats, the beauty of it is once you have your beats you can reuse them for lots of songs , copy them then change speed and rename the beat and so on etc etc ST3 is very powerful if you want it to be.

steve-t

crikey Damir - that sounds very good but I admit it far to complicated for me to muster - the 5 minute drum track is, I admit, quite old fashioned (like my first drum machine 40 years ago - Roland cr8000) - but it muddles through - i will try the 'rewind' key as Peter suggests and that should be great

Damir

steve-t that sounds very good but I admit it far to complicated for me to muster - the 5 minute drum track is, I admit, quite old fashioned (like my first drum machine 40 years ago - Roland cr8000) - but it muddles through - i will try the 'rewind' key as Peter suggests and that should be great

It’s actually quite simple, if you are recording five minutes of your drum pattern and it’s continually the same you are totally wasting recording space and time you can easily record 1 bar or as many bars as you need and use the simple loop function and activate permanent loop on the section so instead of fine minutes you only need to record a few seconds for every pattern and just loop that section ,
The 24 looping audio parts you have in every recording means you can record 24 different length patterns in any song recording this is very easy to create if you just record the conservative patterns in your original recording.
All you do is hit record on your daw hit play on your drum machine and go through selecting different patterns as it’s recording once you have all 24 different patterns in line save this recording to ST3 as normal then go to SONG DETAIL and EDIT AUDIO REGIONS and simply create a loop for every pattern you have recorded you can have anything from 1 to 24 regions , whatever your drum beat requirements are, once you have this created you basically have a full on drum machine like your hardware drum machine except with this one you can also attach lyrics to every pattern so when you hit verse 1 loop you also get verse 1 Lyrics this capability is fantastic is you need instruction for whatever reason, your normal drum machine can’t do that and it’s very easy to create , your few minute recording now becomes a very powerful thing as you can easily just copy this same song change its name to a different song set up a different speed change the lyrics and presto using the same recording you can play numerous songs, another advantage the more different beats you create the number of different songs multiplies by hundreds saving you time in the long run , so by using ST3 as a drum machine it can do any type of beats you decide to record in to it so if you play unusual beats you can simply record them in to ST3 and whalla! You have a drum machine you can’t buy off the shelf that plays the beats you need.
ST3 is a beast unleashed, you just need to learn its easy once you discover its logic which is actually more logical than most of the shelf products.
Hope I have inspired you and others to make good use of ST3 and enjoy performing with it.
Cheers Damir