Standalone drum loops program for teaching - recommendations sought

Chris F

Chris F

New member
Hi everyone, haven't been around here for a while, but could use a bit of advice and since the last time I asked here, Harvey Gerst made a legendary megathread out of it, I thought to try again on a different subject. :)

Basically, I'm a music professor at the University of Louisville and am looking for a program to use primarily in teaching bass lessons (mostly double bass, but some electric bass as well). I've read a number of the "EZdrummer vs. everything else" threads, and most of the programs that I watch youtube demos of sound perfectly good for my purposes. The issue I need help with is that I want to use these grooves as basically a glorified groove metronome for lessons, and won't likely be using it inside a DAW for the normal purposes that these things seem to be designed for. So if you were to recommend a standalone drum/groove program for this purpose for a music teacher, what would your top choice (or 2 or 3) be?

Some things that would be useful:
- Ease of use: Something that can easily call up a groove in a variety of styles without asking me 1000 questions about details
- Mac friendly (although I doubt that's a huge issue these days)
- Length of pattern: one bar is fine, but longer patterns are more interesting to practice with
- Sounds: I mainly teach acoustic-type music (jazz,world, folk, indie, motown-esque, funk, etc)
- Easy to change tempo from within the main standalone interface

Any/all advice appreciated, thanks!
 
The Abbey Road stuff from Native Instruments is also good. Runs in the stand alone mode, plus NI gives discounts for students and educators. Good luck!
 
The vintage drums package sounds amazing! I'm trying to envision how it would work as a standalone.
 
Yes, the Vintage Drums are nice. Drum Lab is also a good one. I don't think you can edit the "Groove" in the stand alone mode, but can inside a DAW. I'm not sure about that because I've been using EZ Drummer, but I think I'm right. You teach music so I'm wondering if you saw that documentary by Ken Burns called Jazz? It's very entertaining as well as informative, and might be something for your students to watch. Ciao
 
When you say "edit the groove", what do you mean? The "humanization" feature? I'll mostly need to adjust tempo in standalone mode, but the ability to loosen the feel up would also be nice.

Yes, I've seen the burns videos - some really nice stuff in there!
 
I mean add new hits or different fills from the ones already included. In the stand alone mode you can indeed adjust the tempo and the humanization feature. Hope this helped.
 
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