Alesis SR18: Bill Makes Like Patrick Duffy And Goes Step-By-Step
To quantize or not to quantize. It's not a question when it come to house music. As Bill Holland knows, the only question when it comes to dance music and the Alesis SR18 is: where do we want to cowbell to fall?
Bill shows us how to wrangle up a decent beat, and even how to sequence a bassline underneath, all from scratch.
BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and you're looking at the Alesis SR18 drum sequencer and bass step sequencer. Now, we'll take a look on how to make a basic song in here.
So first, let's create a basic beat. My quantizing is a little high so I want to go in to record setup, give us a name first of all. I don't know; we'll just call it -- I'll call it Gearwire. Why not?
Okay. So now I've got my pattern loaded. What I'm going to do is make sure my quantizing again is set to an eighth note. This will make it easier for me just doing basic beats, and what it does is it shifts your notes over to fit eighth notes, so if it's a 16th note off or a 32nd off or a 64th off, it'll readjust your beat to be what's called quantized.
A lot of new wave music and a lot rock music is not quantized because they just didn't do that on a lot of those 80's 12" mixes, and a lot of new rock too they don't necessarily quantize. Some bands do, especially with the advent of digital DAWs like Ableton and Sonar, and there are also people who don't do that so they get more of an organic feel.
In this case, we're making house so we don't necessarily need an organic bass kick. In fact, that may actually be to our detriment if it sounds a little too humanized in the bass drum and snare. We want those to be solid. So, let's record those real quick.
[BILL RECORDS SOME DRUM PARTS]
Alright. So now we have our loop. Let's go ahead and assign some percussive elements. In this case, I want to take my quantizing down a little bit, so let's go to record setup, quantize select, and take it down to a 16th, and record.
[BILL RECORDS PERCUSSION PARTS]
Now, let's say I don't like where that's falling. I can go into step edit and we can listen to each step of the way, and we can remove it if we want or take it down. See, I can erase that step, so now nothing there. [BILL AUDITIONS TRACK]. Okay, so that one that falls there, you can go through one, two, three, four, five: that's what I want to delete or move over so I'm going to erase that, I'm going to go down a step, and I may hit that again. Let's go back to the pattern. [BILL RECORDS PERCUSSION PART]
Alright. So now we have our loop with the percussion, let's add some bass. Right now, I can transpose my bass to wherever I want. [BILL RECORDS BASS PARTS]
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