jason@SSD.HARRIS.COM (Jason Baietto) (11/01/89)
AAARGH! Okay, I did a dumb thing. I bought MacDrums from Coda. I thought
from reading the documentation (before I purchased it) that this was what I
had been looking for for a long time. Here's what I wanted:
- THE ABILITY TO NAME EACH INSTRUMENT AND ASSIGN IT TO A MIDI CHANNEL/NOTE.
This is very important to me because I refuse to sequence my drum machine
and samplers by looking at a dot on a screen that corresponds to some key
on a keyboard that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the drum sound I want.
MacDrums MIDI lets you do this!
- FLEXIBILITY.
This is why I want to GIVE my two original disks to the first person to
email me any desire for them. To summarize, here are the features that I
need that MacDrums MIDI lacks:
- The ability to set the tempo to any number of beats per minuite that
I want. MacDrums MIDI has hard coded settings like 128, 150, etc. and
if 128 is too slow, but 150 is too fast then you are SCREWED.
- The ability to change tempo from measure to measure. MacDrums MIDI has
one tempo setting that applies to the whole track. Period. I would
like to even be able to change tempo within measures, but that isn't
crucial to me at this time.
- The ability to assign a meter to each measure. No can do with MacDrums.
- The ability to have more than 16 beats to a measure. Also, the ability
to assign an arbitrary last beat to any given measure (e.g. one measure
could contain only 10 slots instead of 16 slots). Not MacDrums again.
- The ability to name measures (e.g. "final crash", "intro", "2&4 w/hat")
MacDrums lets you put a measure in one of four banks (labelled A,B,C,D)
and in one of 16 slots for a total of 64 total. B7 versus "final crash"?
You've got to be kidding.
- The ability to give any instrument its own velocity/volume level. With
MacDrums you can adjust track velocity from 1 to 8 (whatever that
corresponds to in the MIDI velocity world) but the whole track changes.
You can give all bass drums a velocity different from the track velocity
but not any specific instance of the bass drum. How can you do a rolling
creshendo?
- The ability to take advantage of ANY of the Macintoshes intelligent
cutting and pasting stuff. Can you believe that MacDrums MIDI has
*ONLY TWO* screen buttons to let you assemble a track from! They are
the ADD MEASURE button and the CLEAR TRACK button!!!! If you make a
mistake you have to clear the track and add the measures ONE BY ONE to
the track again. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME I PAID MONEY FOR THIS PROGRAM!
You can't cut a series of measures out and insert them, or delete a
series of measures, or anything you've come to expect out of ANY Mac
application written by anyone with a high school degree or more. Ack!
The above is enough to make anyone want to flame Coda for weeks, but I realize
that I took a chance when I bought it and I'm really not that po'd about it.
But, IS THERE ANYTHING OUT THERE THAT WILL DO WHAT I WANT? If not I fear
that I will be forced to buy Apple's MIDI Manager and write a PD program to
do so (Not such a scary thought due to the fact that I code in C for a living).
Here are some other things I'd like the package to do:
- Different instrument lists for each measure. Why have 16 slots for
instruments listed on screen if you're only using 3 or 4 in the measure?
And if you only use a samba whistle in one measure, why should every other
measure be forced to display it while you're editing it?
- An iconic picture of the track composed of iconic pictures of measures (with
their measure names displayed below the icons. That way, you could select
a group of measures with the mouse, copy them, click between two measure
icons and paste them. The iconic track could be displayed in a short
window taking up a small portion of the bottom of the screen allowing
measures being edited to take up most of the screen.
- The ability to save a given measure independently of a track. How many
times have you had to re-program the standard rock beat (Bass on 1&3, Snare
on 2&4, high hat on 123&4)? Wouldn't it be nice to have a window with a
list of measures that can be inserted at any time?
- The ability to put a number into a drum slot instead of just pressing a
button to turn the drum on so that a velocity can quickly be assigned to
the specific instance of that instrument.
- The ability to select a subset of the instrument map in a measure (e.g.
shift select all the base/snare/high-hat of a measure without selecting
any symbols/bells/toms/etc.) and paste it into a new track. And maybe to
an existing track.
- Finally, the ability of the program to take advantage large screens so
that a drum track can be assembled while viewing the Big Picture of the
song (i.e. several measures displayed on the screen, all capable of being
edited instantly).
It seems to me that all keyboard sequencers will fall short of the above
goals which are very tied to drum machine programming. So either somebody
tell me where I can get such a beast, or send me ideas and features that
you'd like to see in this kind of software.
To summarize MacDrums MIDI:
It is a toy. Of the 35 samples I got with the program, about 10 are
decent. It is so limited and disfunctional that it could serve only to
educate someone new to computers and music. Like most toys, if you're in
the right frame of mind you can have a lot of fun with it, but when you
want to do something serious...you're out of luck. I recommend it for
anyone who's never seen a drum machine before.
Jason Baietto
Harris Computer Systems Division
jason@SSD.HARRIS.COM
"Melt the guns." - Andy Partridge of XTC