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19/08/2004 |
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FXpansion's DR-005 Drum Sampler Player Somewhere inside everybody, there’s a drummer just waiting to get out, and Ian Waugh has found the just the toy to appease those innate longings…
One of the great things about the powerful computers we have now is that they can process audio data with ease. One result of this is soft sampler and its more-dedicated cousin the drum sampler. And such is FXpansion's DR-005. It's the DR-002's (this is freeware!) bigger brother, the DR-008's smaller brother, and one of only a couple of FXpansion's programs to be converted to the Mac. (As of writing the Windows version was temporarily unavailable but this is likely to be, er, temporary.) The program is arranged like a 16-channel mixer and
each channel can hold a sample. You can use any sample at all but
the program has special features for use with drum samples. Also,
the samples are stored in RAM so are best kept fairly short. You can
load samples into each channel individually and save and load an
entire kit so customisation is very easy. Each channel has a MIDI note assigned to it and this can easily be changed, again, making it easy to customise the kit. A small niggle here is that you must click on a number each time you want to change it - it would be easier if the numbers scrolled automatically when you held down the mouse button or if you could type in a number directly. But a minor point. The channel controls include a volume fader, pan, solo and mute buttons. You can change the pitch of the sample and there's a great pitch sweep function that changes the pitch during playback, great for ethnic sounds. There's also a decay control that shortens the sample.
Each drum can be assigned to one of four outs. In the case of Cubase, for example, they appear in the mixer and here you can apply effects and additional processes. The program has no built-in effects but that simply cuts down on clutter. As it's a plug-in, it can use the effects which come or are also plugged-in to the host software. The quality of the output will, of course, depend on the samples you use and here the world is your oyster. There are countless drum sample CDs available and lots of samples freely available for download from the Net. The DR-005 is straightforward and easy to use, it works exceedingly well and is good value for money. There's a demo on the company's web site so you can try before you buy. |
Finally,
there's a choke control which makes two drums mutually exclusive so
playing one stops the other. You'd use this with an open and closed
hi hat, for example, so the closed hi hat cuts off the ringing of
the open hi hat.