Behringer LMDrum

[BaronEstelle]

Just got this yesterday. I've been doing drum machines and samples, loops, and a ton of real drummers for 40 years. All the way back to the
dimunitive Cazio RZ-1, well maybe not dimunitive in the literal sense. Never found drum machines to be very satisfying really. I used Acid for years primarily
because of the slop up possible with editing the loops in software.

The Linn Drum of 1980's pop music fame has been effectively duplicated by Behringer and it's really sonically impressive. The Linn Drum is copies was THE drum
machine widely produced that used real drum samples blown onto prom chips based on actual recordings of some of the best LA session drummers of the era. The Behringer
unit, side by side, is sound for sound matched perfectly to the Linn Drum, it nails it. Now what does that mean for the non-drummers that want drums?

The Linn Drum changed things. It became an instrument in and of itself. Prince was one of the most prolific Linn users of all. His first radio hit "Wanna be your lover" actually
played to the beat on the Linn, using it's locked rhythm creatively. Not all artists were that creative but they got the idea. Singers liked it because it was "just play the beat" with
no fancy stuff in between. Sting hated Stewart Copelands outstanding drum chops and just wanted him to play the beat. Sting not only bought a Linn but a Synclavier as well so
when he did his first solo album he literally printed all the parts for his world class studio musicians, who of course could all read music. Any musician should be able to read music,
it doesn't make sense not to. Otherwise you better be thoroughly familiar with your instrument from top to bottom and all the in-betweens and have explored a wide variety of styles and chords and be able to play them at the drop of a hat.

So this thing is not like the easiest thing, it doesn't ask you what you want to hear and fondly deliver. No this thing is weird, buggy, I'm not too fond of it at this point. It got stuck in the "You Spin Me Round" the totally goofiest 80's song in the world that I hate and I can't get it off despite multiple factory resets. It's got issues, but it sounds fantastic even on that sonic excrement of a song. It just
makes any drum part sound better than any other drum machine. I won't see better than a live drummer because I don't even believe that is possible but this one gets as close as any I've ever
heard. The Linn has always existed in this ultra rare area where you have to be armed with cubic dollars or know someone to just lay eyes on one. I'm incredibly thankful to Uli Behringer, a true
musician, classically trained pianist, something I readily identify with, who has really made great efforts to produce some seriously good and seriously musical instruments.

I searched on this to make sure there was no prior thread or discussion. I"m not optomistic but I hope this could get some worthwhile discussion. That doesn't seem to happen to often.

 

[Papanate]

I searched on this to make sure there was no prior thread or discussion. I"m not optomistic but I hope this could get some worthwhile discussion. That doesn't seem to happen to often.

Who wants to go thru the frustration of dealing with ancient machines? I use EZ Drummer - maybe a million times better than any drum machine of 1980s -and if I want I can get all the Linn Drum samples and none of the frustration of the machine.

 

[BaronEstelle]

I use samples, mostly in Reason. Uhh...to answer your question, I want to go through the frustration of dealing with modern, ancient,
and in-between machines. I don't use EZ drummer because I find the sounds pretty common, but nothing wrong with it. And let me
elaborate.

Do you make music with the arch virtue of great music is it being "easy?" Maybe you do, and if you do, good on you. You must know
something I don't. I don't do music because it's easy, because it's not easy. It's hard, very hard. If it was easy everyone would do it. I didn't spend ten years of classical lessons and minimum 3 judged recitals per year from age 5-15 because it was "EZ Piano," I did it
because my grandmother would have killed me had I not (kidding), because I wanted to and the mental discipline and work ethic it
imparted are such that I have never stopped playing music ever in my life.

A story, how I first became a composer at age 18 because I could finally and mysteriously conceive of "parts" of music with drums and strings and flutes and I wrote a sequenced piece of music called "Night Driving" as a senior in college using gear I had borrowed from the university (Ole Miss) and I'd never heard anything like it and decided I would do that for the rest of my life.

It was, indeed, one of the hardest things I'd ever done and it took two days just to get the TR727, Yamaha DX7, Roland MT-32, EMU Emax, and Akai X7000 with a Yamaha QX-21 sequencer together to run that out on a cassette. Went and bought a brand new Maxell tape, all the money I had in my pocket, to record it on. That was the coolest musical thing I'd ever done up until that point. I had come off of a 2 year stint playing in bars with a "hair band" band when I had first gotten to the college. Playing rock and roll was boringly easy but it was a blast travelling all up and down Mississippi and other states on the "Chitlin Circuit" playing in places that Muddy Waters, the Isleys, Little Richard, had played in years before, and left evidence of their presence. Crossed paths with bands that were just coming out on MTV. We never did anything spectacular. We were all students and all but one graduated and several of us went on to grad school, one went to law school, I went into my first masters program. Wow, LIFE.

At any rate, those few days changed my musical outlook completely and utterly. Now, over 600 written and recorded pieces later, I look back fondly on that first piece. But I don't look back on it because it was easy. I don't back and remember it as easy, it was incredibly hard, and just plain "ARgggghh!!." No, if I had walked away because it was "too hard" or "too much of a hassle" or said "Who wants to go through the frustration of these complex machines?" (it sounds whiney from that angle) my life would no doubt have been very different, and in some sense, the world would have been different.

I've only release about 40 of those pieces of music, and never really had a desire to. I have no explanation why other than I have never had a desire to be a part of "the music business." It always seemed to be based on shallow pretense and a superficial view of what great music is/was. I never could accept that view of music. But the real reason is that somewhere along the way the challenge became not to release or compose music that "people would like or think was good" but music that I had to challenge myself with. I had to better myself, to push the envelope. I didn't want music that sounded like any other, I didn't want to sound like anyone else. In my mind that probably pushed me even further away from the concept of writing music that would sell very much, or that would be accepted by the establishment as good, popular, profitable, etc. I was never leary of that process because of the music, but because of the shallow attitudes. Music was more valuable to me than to be reduced to an economic or profit motive. Maybe it would have been different if it had. I also believe that doing it for profit or popularity doesn't ruin it, it just depends on the constitution of the maker(s) and what their dispositions are.

Duke Ellington, the most prolific of all American composers, when asked what his "favorite" piece of music was, he always answered "Oh....the one I'm going to write tomorrow, the next one." I had years before developed the same attitude, again, and the result was that the other more typical motivations seemed to fade away.

Well even that has changed. I've decided to put together about one hundred pieces and put them on an aggregator and release them to a contemporary market as "electronic" music and see what happens. I suppose I just want to share these things with a listening public. I have gotten to the point that I have so many pieces of music that I'll listen to say, several files I find on an old hard drive, and I'll have absolutely zero recollection of the music. That has happened literally hundreds of times. Not that the music was so profound or anything. I feel like I need to get to cataloging it because hell farr, nobody else will, so it might as well be me. I'm going to put a bunch on ASCAP. So my legacy to the world as a philosopher/musician will be my many some odd books I write that are for sale on Amazon and the pieces of music. And the few documentaries I've made on streams and waterfalls of the Appalachians. Still got a ways to go though. Wow, life is grand. Not easy, wouldn't want it easy, but it is Grand.

(pardon the ramble, I'm in writer mode)

 

[Papanate]

I use samples, mostly in Reason. Uhh...to answer your question, I want to go through the frustration of dealing with modern, ancient,
and in-between machines. I don't use EZ drummer because I find the sounds pretty common, but nothing wrong with it. And let me
elaborate.

Do you make music with the arch virtue of great music is it being "easy?" Maybe you do, and if you do, good on you. You must know
something I don't.

(pardon the ramble, I'm in writer mode)

EZ Drummer sounds common if you program it in a common manner - I’ve been a working musician for most of my adult life - I have no desire to work through trying get sounds - sounds are sounds - my partner and I write music - we look for sounds but have no desire to struggle for sounds - thats for kids.

 

[BaronEstelle]

EZ Drummer sounds common if you program it in a common manner - I’ve been a working musician for most of my adult life - I have no desire to work through trying get sounds - sounds are sounds - my partner and I write music - we look for sounds but have no desire to struggle for sounds - thats for kids.

Okay this is getting a bit trite and I'm going to take you to task.

sounds are sounds? So what is the point? Kids struggle for sounds? Would you like that set out in
symbolic logic or simply accept that it is entirely subjective and non-sequiter.

Struggle for sounds? Call me a kid then, I'm a kid. I have 110 Gigabytes of childishness stored on my primary composing machine. Pure childishness. I compose in Reason and track in Pro Tools. As a "kid"
I never struggled for sounds since the piano was my deal. Classical lessons for ten years, no struggle there except learning 10 new pieces per year for judged recitals, that I hated. No struggle, just childhood formation. It gave me a musical foundation, I wasn't skilled enough to become a concert pianist, still not. I discovered synths around age 15 and later became an electronic composer.

Just thought you might have missed that part in that rather lengthy response.

I have been a musician for all but four years of my entire life, and a professional musician since
age 19. So what. The struggle with sound is one of the primary struggles with electronic music, in
my experience. If you don't struggle, then good on you. It takes work, lots of work, to render these tones out of these machines to the point of uniqueness and creative satisfaction. Yes, it is struggle with sound, but there is nothing childish about it.

It is the process of composing.....just to throw it out there plainly. Beethoven sat for weeks at the fortepiano with plates and plates of rotten food all around. He literally defecated and urinated on himself as he sat there hour after hour, day after day. Struggle? You bet. Was Beethoven childish? You'd be in a minority if you even suggested as much. Now Mozart was childish, he was said to have a "drunkenness of spirit" that so predisposed him to musical output that he only wrote down what he heard in his head. He himself wrote that music "came to him fully formed" with hardly any correction. Needless to say his mature business skills of selling his output was not up to the unearthly quality of his music. Paganini seems to have got that formula right, he was the equivalent of a billionaire in his day from his outlandish concert fees, routinely 2 to 3 times the price of usual performers. He famously struggled on and off the stage in order to be able even play and maintain his concert fitness. Struggle is part of the game. One time Paganini practiced a single passage of music that he had written, for ten hours straight, just to get it right. Struggle indeed.

Not sure why "...my partner and I..." is relevant here. I too write music, as for looking for sounds it is not the same as writing music. I usually have sounds well at hand before writing/recording takes place. Sounds themselves, and of course this could be completely wrong according to you (ruh roh) are the inspiration for music, and they are certainly worth struggling for in order to get that extra dash of inspiration.

Now lastly, I've never 'programmed' EZ Drummer in a 'common manner' nor have I heard that product in common, uncommon, outer-Mongolian, Slobobian, Portmodern Smarta**, or what have you.

You said in your first response (?) you mentioned "frustration with ancient machines," and in the second response (??) you speak of "struggling with sounds." What's your deal bro? Is the process of making music just a big hassle or something? If it is, by all means don't do it!! Perhaps you prefer live performance over writing. You mention nothing about yourself personally aside from these rather threadbare and negative statements.

Not much to go on. But take note, the tolerance is waning. Feel free to make a premise, premise, conclusion argument at some point as that is a great way to get your point across, or not. Like what is your point, your position, your angle on this beyond the frustrations and struggles galore, travail, sufferings, ancient machines, electrical gremlins all about, just a pitfall of snafus and false starts which is all this thing of music-making amounts to.......said no one ever.

On the other hand....is Ringo really the luckiest musician of all time?

 

[BaronEstelle]

I did a little research on EZ Drummer, I've actually demo'd it before but removed it from my machine. It's like a "for songwriters" thing for people, I suppose who sing or write songs for singers. In any case it's fine, looks like a fine piece of software for "just doing drums" in a way that they are covered without too much of a hassle. I understand more now and I also see that is exactly the opposite of where I'm at right now. I don't want the drums to "be in the song" or cover the beat, I want the percussion to be an instrument with specific sounds that sound and have specific sound characteristics. It's not a struggle or some kind of hassle or difficulty for me at all, no, I WANT TO DO THOSE SOUNDS SPECIFICALLY in a specific way precisely because they are those types of sounds that get thrown into music just to have something there. Nah, I'm going to pay extra careful attention to those sorts of things, just like other sorts of things coming from the continual flow of fresh and new sounds into my studio, including more Behringer synths. I want to be working with machines to wrangle sounds out of them. The working with the sounds in new and different ways is half the point. If everything was the same every time with some slightly varied beat everything would sound even more the same now than it already does. Forget that.

 

[DM60]

That drum machine looks pretty cool, especially if you want to go DAWless jams. I know they were a big deal in the 80's, I think now they are really purpose driven machine. From what I know of the machines (from the orginal) and reviews I have read, I can see the attraction. Could be a cool jam/live performance machine for sure.

 

[RFR]

Wanting a Lynn drum isn’t much different than wanting an original Boss Chorus. You know, the big green one with the 110v plug.

They’re all just tools of making music.

 

[DM60]

Wanting a Lynn drum isn’t much different than wanting an original Boss Chorus. You know, the big green one with the 110v plug.

They’re all just tools of making music.

I want the retro But really, I have heard so many good things about the Behringer. Plus there are some updates to be able to interface it if I remember the reviews.

 

[BaronEstelle]

I didn't get the Behringer from want of a LinnDrum, but I can't say I wouldn't have gotten one eventually. The LinnDrum is on hundreds if not thousands of 80's and 90's hits. Roger Linn has said that Prince was his marketing department. Distinct from sampling, Linn made prom chips of sounds of real drummers, LA Session musicians, blown into those chips and mounted on what amounted to an analog synth circuit board with sounds that had an analog fullness more like an Oberheim synth. Prince used the Linn creatively as an instrument with several "signature" sounds you'd recognize if you heard them.

That's what I like about it, that and the fact that is sounds better than any drum machine I've ever heard and the sounds are highly editable and changeable. It also has sampling so it effectively brings in the MPC thing in a high quality DAC context. There is another one of these high quality exact copies out there called a Numa One which is about 4 grand and does have the vintage analog circuitry and is essentially a duplicate of a Linn that Roger Linn himself approves of. He is not crazy about the Behringer.

I have seen numerous videos of the Linn and the Behringer side by side, they are exactly the same with the Linn maybe being a tad more hi-fi. I'm going to fix that with Behringers (here we go again) analogy filter that is a copy of the Moogerfooger and a tube preamp to bump things up nicely. I don't look at it is a copy thing but rather as a chance to be free from having to have gigabytes of drumloops at the ready. Or, especially, it's not some vintage struggle, it's just to have really good drums because I know this thing has great sound. That's somewhat still responding to the idea that it is some an inconvenience to get drum sounds out of this thing. Perhaps it will be at times but that's part of process. If it was easy everyone would do it.

Behringer has also done the do on the Oberheim DMX, called, oddly, the BMX and it, again, is a precise duplicate of the Obie. they also have the RD-8 and the RD-9 that exactly duplicate the Roland TR 808 and 909 respectively. I think Behringer is doing an incredible service to the music making community for bringing authentic sounding versions of these things. Trying to find and buy one of those things IS a struggle. Ordering one of the interwebs and plugging it in your studio is not at all. For all that, Behringer
has really ran through a bunch of classic synths, the Oberheim OBX-A, Rolands, you name it, and these things sound fantastic. this is not the Behringer of old that had some spotty quality here and there it seems. these machines are almost a point of arrival for the company as if they wanted to do this all along and couldn't wait to do it. I'm glad they did, it's great to have access to these classic sounds. I for one will be ordering many of them.

 

[rob aylestone]

I’m totally confused. I totally understand people liking certain bits of kit because they like the style or the operating system, or the sound, I personally, just treated Linn drums as a sound. One that fitted some songs really well, but not, for me, a sound that warranted outlay. What I had available were close enough. I’m not a drummer, so finding the right drum sounds for me is fairly painless. I have loads of kontakt drums available, but also have the Steinberg Halion bundled ones. I find everything I need there. The ones that program the way the Linn (and others) did never worked for me.

If you love Linn drums for any reason, I’m sure buying the Behringer will make you happy. I’m not sure I could identify a real original Linn sound from the Behringer, and probably not from the many other similar ones out there. I do know I never ever want a manual standalone drum machine. I hated them!

 

[BaronEstelle]

I completely identify with your terminal thought there, I hate them too. Only about a year ago I acquired, in a large haul of music gear from the widow of a musician I never knew. She couldn't stand the gear being there, so I made her a very small price on what has turned out to be about nine grand worth of gear. Amongst those are the Alesis HR16, SR16, and the "classic" Casio RZ-1. I fiddled with the Casio because I owned one back around age 19. I fiddled with it and it sounded far worse than the drums I've grown accustomed to working with. The HR16 is a very well known drum box that was used as a good sounding budget box. The newer SR represented similar but overall better sounds. This range of drum boxes seemed to be a response to things like the Linn.

Roland had been assualting the drum issue for years and their CR78, 727, 808, and 909 are solid electronic alternatives made popular by rap, hip hop, and electronic musicians. I've used a hundred iterations of the 808 kick over the years.

I went through a 20 plus year phase of essentially trying to "get by" with drums in my pieces. I was writing instrumental electronic or just long form ambient synth pieces with no drums. Acid was a godsend because drums were now easily looped and sourced from a zillion places. This worked, very well, for a long time. I because quite adept at making my own software loops and massaging sounds and beats into beats. The sonic variety and the fact that I was completely comfortable with the computer side of things made it very easy to do. But I still never got comfortable with drum machines, or more drummish software solutions.

When VST came into it's own more I began to look more closely at percussion/drum based solutions as an answer, I still never saw much. One of the least beneficial aspects of training and playing classical for many many years is not playing with anything more than a metronome. You internal time becomes very correct but referencing something external for time becomes more difficult. Playing with a drummer in bar bands was easy because the time was so loose and irregular anyway. Rock music always manages to slop it up some way.

After 35 plus years of this business I'm finding a strong push to address my drum/percussion weakness or ineptness at any rate to make this thing work, and work creatively, as an instrument. It's just going to take some time and wrangling. I do believe that once the compression, filters, effects, etc. starting getting all lined up and then down the road within the next year the SSL console shows up I want to be able to really make full sounding creative drum tracks that fit well with my compositions, indeed, that they be an integral part. I have gotten the feeling at times that the drums were just "stand-in" because "it will work" was too often the mantra. Well, that pragmatism has to go as I'm pushing myself to make the best possible music that I can. Nothing in the past matters, the next phase is the phase that matters. Very much looking for higher level results.

I don't know what particular composite of gear, tracking, effects, etc. that makes this more or less possible. I guess that's why we come here to discuss it. These comments, for the most part, have been insightful even this early on, it's nice to read comments from other musicians and composers.