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| AMDRUM (c) Digital Drum System (Cheetah Marketing) | AMDRUM (Popular Computing Weekly) |
Build your own rhythm section The new kit. which comes with a Kit Editor allowing you to choose any of the available sounds and combine them with earlier sounds, consists of eight new effects - Trunk, Buash, Hi Conga, Lo Conga, Clave, Coconut, Guiro and Whistle. Some of these are similar to sounds in the Latin set, but there's been nothing quite like the Trunk, Coconut and Buash before. Trunk is a son of double bass drum hit. not very ' wood-like”but quite powerful, while Buash is a high, pingy. snare drum The congas are quite lifelike (the Latin kit has Timbales instead); the Clave again lacks a certain woody timbre but is useful for punctuation (perhaps as the African equivalent of a closed hi-hat) Coconut is a short pop sound and Guiro is a shortish but effective wood scraper, while one of the most impressive sounds is the Whistle, a short blast which bends slightly downwards The Kit Editor on the B-side of the tape allows you to reverse sounds, which is more useful in some cases than in oth ers, and there's now a total of four kits available Rock (which comes free with the SpecDrum/AmDrum), Latin. Electro and African. Cheetah claims that its system now has 30.000 uses ranging from professional rock bands and studios to young amateur musicians, and we've certainly heard some very impressive demos using the system The main limitation, of course, is the fact that you only have one output so you can't treat the sounds individually - but Cheetah does have a sheet of information on how to synchronise the system if you want to use it with other equipment and possibly record one drum sound at a time. On the Amstrad version, sounds can be loaded from tape and saved to disc or vice versa, and the new kit costs just £4.99 from Boots and major high street stores and computer shops On to the Commodore 64 and Polydrums. the polyphonic drum playback system for the Commodore Sound Sampler Unfortunately, Polydrums only uses the sampler m playback mode, and existing sampler files aren't compatible with Polydrum files, so you're stuck with the sound sets provided These, however, are pretty good -one Natural kit. one Latin kit and one Electronic kit There's a single mam operations page which allows you to select the desired kit. and twenty-six demo patterns can be called up by tapping the letter keys. There are also four song memories, with one demo song for each kit and one spare. Going on to the Edit page allows you to program in patterns of up to 32 beats in real time or step time using the 1-8 keys for the sounds. The system is polyphonic as its name suggests, so up to four sounds can be programmed on the same beat (most other systems only offer two or three note polyphonic playing). All operations are carried out on the function keys, and the program's very simple to use, although you'll come up against a dead end if you switch on the Midi output options as Music Sales, the UK agents for the Commodore music systems, still haven't come up with a suitable Midi interface for the system. Tempo is set from 2-32, not as professional as having a full display in beats per minute, and you can name patterns and songs The song composition display is simply a long list of letters from A-Z, and again it's programmed using the function keys to a total of 245 patterns. The Polydrums package will no doubt be welcomed by existing Sampler owners, as it s streets ahead of the simple 16-beat monophonic program supplied with the hardware. But it still has some limitations which didn't really have to be there the limited choice of tempo settings, incompatibility with Sampler files and so on. The bottom line, though, is that the sounds are pretty good (the Latin cowbell is poor and the congas hissy, but the Electronic set is excellent with a good ride cymbal and Simmons-like basses, snares and toms), and so you probably wouldn't be disappointed at the price. More ambitious Commodore owners would probably go for the more expensive Tron Digidrum III, though. Some news of product reviews to come Hybrid Arts software and hardware is just starting to filter into the country via Syndromic Music, and the first products available are DX-Droid and Easy Track for the Atari 520ST/1040ST. DX-Droid creates banks of random sounds for the Yamaha DX7 synth and allows you to store and modify them in various ways, while Easy Track is a very basic, simply laid out 20-track Midi composer. Cheetah Marketing Ltd, 1 Willowbrook Science Park, Crickhowell Road. St Mellons. Cardiff Tel 0222 777*** Popular Computing Weekly |
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