Drum Machines

Drum Machines

Since a lot of songs need some form of percussion, you might want to check out a drum machine and drum pattern maker. These nifty devices let you create drum patterns you can use for your compositions.

Essentially a form of software synthesizer, a drum machine typically will let you do one thing, produce a pattern of repeating sounds. This pattern can then, usually, be saved as a WAV file to be used elsewhere. Of course, you will probably find these applications just fun to play with. Some let you shape your own sounds, some you load WAV files with drum sounds, and others come preloaded with their own sounds. Regardless, they ultimately allow you to work within the confines of a set number of measures and allow you to determine the tempo and when each sample is to be played .

Like software synthesizers, these are highly specialized applications and also require a lot of CPU to be effective. Here are some drum machines to look at:

·                 gAlan: modular synthesizer “drum machine “sequencer “effects unit for Linux and Win32

·                 Green Box: next -generation drum machine

·                 RhythmLab: displays and sounds polyrhythms

·                 The Real Thud: a simple WAV mixer most useful as a drum machine

Figure 20-4 presents an example of what a drum machine might look like. This is a screen shot of Thud. Most have the same look, which is basically modeled after their hardware ancestors .

Figure 20-4. Drum machine.

The generation of sound is a key element of creating music with Linux. However, just generating cool sounds and awesome drum patterns doesn't do you any good if you can't put it all together into a song. This is where sequencers (not MIDI) come into play. Somehow, you have to put all those sounds together into patterns of music. For this, you have a couple of options, a MIDI sequencer that also supports audio, a tracker, or loop-based sequencer.

 



Multitool Linux. Practical Uses for Open Source Software
Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software
ISBN: 0201734206
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 257

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