Alesis SR18 Drum Machine with Effects Engine

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List Price: $399.00
Sale Price: $199.98
Today's Bonus: 50% Off

• Professional drum machine -12 velocity sensitive pads (w/Dynamic Articulation) enabling a drum sound to change its tonal content
• Backlit LCD, MIDI I/O, Stereo Main and Aux outputs, drum Roll function, headphone output, 1/4" instrument input jack, 2 footswitch jacks
• ,Battery powered (6xAA - not included) or AC adapter - included
• 32MB sound set with percussion bank and bass synth including over 500 Drum and percussion sounds and 50 bass sounds
• Built-in Effects- Reverb, EQ and Compression on each pad, preset or editable by the user

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This is just a huge sounding drum machine. Forget what they used to sound like years ago this sounds like a real drummer and a very good one at that. With the basslines added this machine can be used to back a singer / guitarist / keys player and you could go on the road solo (what I plan to do).

It can be complicated if you want to go the whole mile and programme it rather than use the sample tracks, but it comes with a very thorough instruction manual. Plan to learn how to do most of the good things during a month of tinkering with it in your spare time. I bought it with two Yamaha FC5 pedals to work it 'live'.Yamaha FC-5 Sustain Pedal for Portable Electronic Keyboards (But it does work with other on/off pedals like the Yamahas as well.) This allows me to start stop and switch between A / B fills and A / B rhythms. You'll need pedals like these if you plan to use this box in front of an audience but you won't need it for practice.

This is a great tool. And better than a drummer because it doesn't have an ego, doesn't need beer to fuel it, and I get to keep all the money from gigs. (I'll do a video review soon.)

If you're on a tight budget or want something a bit easier to programme, try the SR16. Alesis SR16 Drum Machine

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The Alesis SR18 Drum Machine is amazing. I have had many problems with every computer based drum machine program. It's not that they didn't work right, but the fact that they just weren't for me. I am very good with computers, do photography editing, and music editing, etc, all on the few computers I own. As far as doing drums on my computer, It just wasn't clicking. Everyone has to find their path of least resistance, and THEIR best method for doing things, since everybody is different and everyone has their own path of least resistance. Hence, to each, their own. What works best and is the easiest for one person, may be the most complicated for the other. What is most complicated for you, may be the easiest for the other person.

Basically what I am saying is this drum machine, once in my hands, really clicked. This was MY path of least resistance. It's good to know I can sit down with this machine, and only this machine, and make full drum tracks. As far as some people saying this is so hard to use, or takes a couple months, for me it took two days. Hence, 6 one way, half dozen the other. The first day I just messed with it, without directions. It was confusing. The second day, I read the directions, and by the end of the second day, I had already made three full length drum tracks, doing everything from customizing my entire drum set and sounds, making a bunch of patterns, and then piecing all those patterns together to make tracks.

Ok, so now for what it can do:

* I saw one review where they said you cannot change the length of the patterns. This is not true. You CAN indeed change the length of the patterns. You can use whatever tempo you want, 120, 140, whatever, and you can make the patterns 4 beats long, or 8, or 16, etc.

* You can customize your own drum setup, so you have have a couple bass, etc. Rule of thumb if you are trying to re-create double bass, is to make two sounds, almost identical, BUT make the second sound a little different tonewise. Because in real life, you can tell the difference between both bass drums. This makes it sound more realistic.

* There are a TON of different sound variations for every kind of drum sound you want.

* You can tweak each individual sound. For instance, if I find a crash I like, but think to myself that I want it to sound softer, offset it to the right a little, change the pitch to a slightly lower pitch, and also make it ring on longer, ALL of this is possible.

* Learning this machine really is not that hard. Can be done within a good weekend.

All in all, this machine is amazing. I am a heavy metal guitarist, and I record my own tracks on a Tascam DP-02, and this works great in conjunction with that. This machine works very well with the metal genre, or rock, or any genre at all. It lets me put together full length tracks (from all of my combined patterns I made), does very very well using it in a double bass aspect (you can program the bass to sound like double bass, and as fast as you want), and you end up with very realistic sounding drum tracks! Since I play metal, this is VERY important, since it's hard to find a good drum machine that can go with the metal genre. Last, all I have to do is plug it into my Tascam recorder, and record! Love it! This sounds amazing!

The one and ONLY downside to this is the fact that there is NO connection to connect it to your computer. I want to make this clear. There is a way to hook up through your instrument cable connections, but then I'm not sure how this hooks to your computer through a 1/4" cable connection. But all I have to do is record them into my Tascam, then send them to my computer, where I can save them for later.

Hope this helps, and sorry about rambling. Any questions, feel free to comment and I will surely answer them for you the best I can, to help out.

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I had the SR-16 and out of all the drum machines I ever owned it was the most user friendly so when I noticed the new SR-18 I had huge expectations, basically this is the same machine but they have made some very weird changes, my first complaint is you have to save every single thing that you do, they took this to the point of being completely ridiculous,every single edit you make must be saved I am not kidding. and then something weird; I noticed that whatever tempo you decide to play a pattern in it is automatically saved, one of the least important things (to me anyway) so now every pattern has it's very own tempo, that just seems strange to me, one thing I liked about the SR-16 was when you wanted to change the length of a pattern you were give the option of taking bars off the end or the beginning, the SR-18 is like every other drum machine and you can only cut off the end, the SR-16 also had an output to dump all of your data onto a tape or cd (or whatever you prefer) so then you never run ot of memory, The SR-18 does not have this cool feature either,the sounds are good,lots of cool presets but drum machines still have a very long way to go before I will get too excited, I thought this was supposed to be an upgrade. ?

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I've had an SR-16 for years. Loved it; used it regularly. I loved it so much, I started writing Alesis about 10 years ago, asking them to update the sounds to 16-bit. I bought the SR-18 the day it came out. Now I'm going to Ebay it.

I need a drum machine for practice. With a couple of foot pedals, you can run the SR-16 while you and the other guitarists do your thing. Stop, start, decent fills that are completely logical and predictable.

But the SR-18 is just about worthless in that role. Yeah, it sounds gorgeous, but it's just unusable as a live-performance tool. I mean, maybe it's OK if you want to program every single song you do, but to just start it and jam on a song, forget it. Here are some of the weird things:

Genres not grouped together. Wouldn't you expect one click to take you from Rock 1 to Rock 2? Not so. If you're looking for a rock beat, you have to look all over the list to find the next one.

Different tempos for each pattern. So. . .you're playing along a 130 bpm but you decide you need a slightly different rhythm. You dial in a different pattern and wham, you're suddenly playing at 210 bpm. What's with that??

Different track lengths for each pattern. On the old SR-16, all patterns were 2 bars; eight beats. Boring, maybe, but useful and predictable. It was easy to insert a fill because you knew what was coming. On the SR-18, some patterns are 16 beats, some are 8, some are 20. . .I forget. But there you are, jamming along and you go to the Fill function to bring you to the chorus. . .and it starts the fill 8 beats too late. Sheesh. With the SR-16 I got so good, I could just tap my footswitch and get a single cymbal crash at the end of a phrase. Not possible now. . .at least, not without years of study.

So: this machine is probably swell if you intend to program each song you do--and play it exactly the same way each time. If, like me, you used the SR-16 for practice, for extending a jam while your lead guitarist got his act together, for a quick simple beat that did the job most of the time. . .save your money. Stick with your old SR-16. That's what I'm doing. Alesis, you broke my heart! Why couldn't you just give us the same great functionality of the SR-16, but with better sounds?

Ok, I JUST received this yesterday. BUT, I have been using the SR16 for over 15 years and used the HR16 before it since the 80s. As some have said, right away you can hear the improvement in the sound, not that the SR16 sounded bad... but this sounds great. I have yet to build my own patterns with this but I see all the familiar buttons to do that, so I suspect it will be very similar to the SR16, which was easy to use, though certainly time consuming to build the patterns, but thats ok. I have gone through about 10 of the patterns so far only because I plugged in my guitar and jammed on each one. Here are the early thoughts: Number 1, if you are a guitarist who has to jam alone a lot, you are going to absolutely love this thing because of the fact that you can get some really nice drum and bass going on at the same time. The pads that give you the drums also give you the notes for the bass for you to program that. Each of the patterns I whipped through took me into different guitar ideas and such, same as jamming with a live drummer and bassist would do. It was fun... and, you know, if you ever have to spontaneously just play SOMETHING for someone it kinda sucks when there is only guitar unless you are a world class guitarist. With this, you get the drums and bass along with you and it makes what you do sound more interesting. Number 2, I think the existing patterns are pretty cool for jamming, but they seem a bit busy for recording... so look at this drum machine as a tool in that its greatest use out of the box is jamming... and then you get the bonus of having the ability to program it for song demos. I have a real drumset and mics and processors and let me tell you trying to record good sounding acoustic drums is a nightmare. In the end the better sounds of a good drum machine, while not always as organic as you'd like still lead to a better sounding demo most of the time compared to live drums in a home demo situation. Number 3, reiterating Number 1, if you are a guitarist or keyboardist... really... the ability to have bass involved as well as drums is AWESOME. I thought the bass would just be a nice little bonus.. its done better than that to make it more than a little thing. I read many reviews on here of people downplaying the bass feature saying they would record their own bass. I agree with them... when recording, you would. But... for simple fun and jamming... this rocks.

My SR16 is still going strong. The only reason I really got this one is because I thought it might be fun to keep one drum machine by my recording unit and one by my keyboard amp for quick live jamming (its no fun always having to unplug and reconnect in different spots) and then I searched Amazon for drum machines and saw Alesis had put out this newer model that I was never aware of. I would say, for any guitarist, its hard to spend $200 and get a tool/toy better than this! Now the trouble is I will want the SR18 in both locations. If you are not sure whether the SR18 is worth the extra cost from the SR16, TRUST ME... it IS!!!

I will update the review in the future if I have anything significant to add... but in an hour or so of jamming, I already think this has proven to be a fantastic purchase!