JASON DONNELLY: Jason Donnelly a.k.a. DJ Puzzle with Gearwire.Com, and I’m taking you back to 1996. This is the Rave-O-Lution 309 by Qausimidi, a really cool Groovebox, one off the first analog emulators. It emulates the 909, 808, and 303, and they also give you additional sounds as well, percussion sounds and what-not.

It’s laid out pretty intuitively. You have your kick, snare, hi-hat, percussion set, bass, and lead synthesizer, and then this is the button -- these are the buttons that you use for step programming and editing parameters such as velocity and gate time. So, it’s a very straightforward from the get go. The menu’s a little deep, a little complicated but what do you expect? They’re coming a lot into a small box here.

In this segment, I’d like to show you how to program a simple techno beat or house beat, basically a four-on-the-floor kick drum with a closed hi-hat and then an open hi-hat on the off beats. I’m starting with a blank pattern, untitled. I’ve already set my tempo to 120. I’m going to start with the kick drum, hit record. I have two options here, master and pattern. Master is for piecing your song together, piecing the patterns together, recording knob movements and changes such as pitches and knob movements, cutoff frequencies, velocities, and what-not.

The first thing you’re going to do is record a pattern so let’s select a pattern by pressing the F3 button. I’m going to scroll to the left here to menu item number 2. Groove is your swing or your shuffle. It gives the feel of a shuffle. I’m going to crank that up to 100%. So, next we’ll scroll over to item number 4, drum grid. Select by pressing F2....