.I’ve been in this “studio upgrade” phase for what seems like years now, and I think I’m finally coming down to the home stretch. One of the biggest headaches I’ve come across is the integration of drum machines into my setup. It is difficult to strike the right balance between the immediacy of hardware and the flexibility of software. Pad controllers didn’t work. Standalone drum machines were limited in what sounds were available. I thought I found my saving grace in the Roland TR-8, but its strange output routing and high sample rate over USB was telling me that it wasn’t the thing I was looking for.
Then I found a Roland TR-505 at a flea market for $50. As a drum machine, it’s not exactly something you’d put at the top of the list. It has no way to adjust any of the drum sounds, no individual outs, no velocity sensitive pads, and it sounds like all the cheesiest parts of the 1980s. What it does have in the pro column is a useable sequencer, MIDI implementation, and a near-perfect form factor. In short, it would make a perfect front end to a software drum machine.
Which one? There are myriads of drum VSTs, from freeware shit plugs to full emulations of classic hardware that rival the real thing, samplers, sequencers, all sorts of things. I was specifically interested in the sound of the Roland TR-909; a machine equally at home with hard-hitting hip-hop and electronic pieces as it was with Radiohead-esque indie rock stuff. To this end, I found two pieces of software that fit the bill: D16 Group’s Drumazon, and FXpansion’s Geist.
Drumazon is a great emulation of the 909 and if I were married to the 909 sound and not my beautiful wife, I’d be pretty happy with it. However, I love my wife a lot more than a piece of software, and sometimes I want to utilize a different set of sounds. So for the sake of my default presets, I turned to the software sampler extraordinaire that is Geist.
By itself, Geist is useless. Most samplers are useless without samples. It’s kind of the whole point of samplers. So for my purposes, I loaded up Goldbaby’s Super Analogue 909, a highly processed compilation of samples recorded in 24/96 that sound great. Goldbaby has done us the favor of making Geist kits with round-robin sampling variations, so the randomness of analog is still there. The extra processing during recording means that it sounds richer and fuller than what you’d probably get with a real machine, and for .8% of the price of a real 909 ($29 compared to $3400).
When paired with the 505, I can finally take my eyes off the computer screen and use all the tiny hardware pieces I’ve collected. I still have some things on my desk to move around, but I don’t feel the need to buy a TR-8 anymore, which is going to save me so much desktop real estate.
