Alesis SR18 Drum Machine/Seperating Tracks

C4th

New member
Hi,
Im recording my SR18 to a Tascam DP24 portastudio,
I was wondering if or how i can designate each drum ie Bass, snare, to individual tracks, so they can be spread across the stereo field.
Also wondering whether this can be done using the SR18s presets? as this is what im using at the moment.
Im using MIDI, the Tascam has 24 tracks.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
 
I am looking at ebay pics of this unit and what you'll have to do is sync the drum machine to your recorder via midi. then because this drum machine only has a right and left output, pan your kick left and pan your snare right and mute all other. record your kick and snare. once thats done mute the kick and snare and unmute the next two and then record them and so on. As long as your recorder is in sync with the drum machine then the tracks should fall into place. Its a little time consuming but that's how we did it back in the day.
 
You're aware that the SR18 has some pretty sophisticated mixing internally? IIRC, there's even some decent effects built in. Is there some reason that's not good enough? If you're wanting to keep your options open till mix time, then just run it in sync with the recorder and don't record the actual audio until that final step.
 
Hi,

Newbie here.

What I do (mind you, I'm not set up for MIDI) is assign the kick to Main output, panned hard left. I assign the snare to Main output panned right. I then assign toms, h/hat, etc. to Aux output (which is stereo) and pan them across that wherever I want them. Stereo Aux output is split into two separate cables.
That way I record my drums across four separate tracks on my Zoom R24.

If you want to get real clever, once again without MIDI, (and yes, I know MIDI would be much better!) you can do what I used to do with my old SR16......

Split any given kit into two separate kits, so that say, Kit 1 has kick, snare, hi-hat and ride assigned to the (effectively) four outputs of the SR18. The rest of that kit is muted right down.
Kit 2 has say two crashes and the toms assigned to it's four outputs. The rest of that kit is muted right down.
You record the song using Kit 1 into four tracks of your recorder.
You then switch over to Kit 2, plugging the leads into the next four inputs of your recorder, and, with practice/coordination, you can record another four tracks of drums.
So you now have 8 separate tracks of drums to mix as you like.

At first it's kinda tricky to synch the second Kit with the first, but it gets easier with practice, and if you mix later in your computer it's dead easy, because you just drag those tracks into synch with the rest.

Very much a low-brow method, but it does work.
I've only just bought my SR18, so I haven't tried the second method yet. It worked with the old SR16, so it should also work with this newer machine.
 
Hi OzzyGreg, I am also from Oz (Melbourne to be exact). I have recently bought the SR18 and have run into a little problem. When I create an A and B track in Pattern User mode, and use my Boss pedal to start the process, then use the pedal to change from A track to B track, the A track goes silent until the B track cues in. This process works fine if I simply use the buttons on the Alesis keyboard. The pedal also works fine when using the Pattern Preset tracks. Can you help? Ted Bryce
 
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