David Westbrook
This is a little program I've found useful for trying out
drum parts. It was inspired by Richard Bettis's keyboard split program
(AMPLINEX 007) and needs a Music 4000 keyboard.
My program uses Richard's technique (in the word 'splitact')
to allocate 8 drum sounds to different parts of the Music 4000 keyboard, thus
giving you an easily accessible 'drum kit' to play with. When you've found a
nice drum pattern you can then record the parts separately as usual - provided you
can remember them!
When the program 'U.DrumKey' is loaded and run, it splits
the keyboard into 8 groups of notes, each group producing a different
instrument. The title display gives you a rough idea of where each instrument
is. In all cases except the toms, the sound is of a constant pitch, so it
doesn't matter which key in the group you hit. The toms are tuned, so each key
in this group does produce a different pitch.
As Richard explained, the more groups the keyboard is split
into, the slower the response. My eight-fold split is really pushing it a bit,
so if you hit more than one drum simultaneously you'll notice a distinct lag.
However, I don't find this too disturbing and I think it's worth it for the
range of sounds. If you disagree, it's fairly easily changed to have less
voices: look at 'splitact' and 'setkit'. Have fun!
Related file on this disc:
Published in AMPLINEX 015, January 1990
