Alesis SR-18 - Studio-Grade Standalone Drum Machine With On-Board Sound Library, Performance Driven I/O and In-Built Effects/Processors

If you are looking for a drum machine at a reasonable price, this Alesis SR-18 is for you. Easy to operate, many digital drum samples, variable drum kits. Plug it in and go for any application. It sounds great!

The Alesis SR18 Drum Machine is amazing. I have had many problems with every computer based drum machine program. It's not that they didn't work right, but the fact that they just weren't for me. I am very good with computers, do photography editing, and music editing, etc, all on the few computers I own. As far as doing drums on my computer, It just wasn't clicking. Everyone has to find their path of least resistance, and THEIR best method for doing things, since everybody is different and everyone has their own path of least resistance. Hence, to each, their own. What works best and is the easiest for one person, may be the most complicated for the other. What is most complicated for you, may be the easiest for the other person. Basically what I am saying is this drum machine, once in my hands, really clicked. This was MY path of least resistance. It's good to know I can sit down with this machine, and only this machine, and make full drum tracks. As far as some people saying this is so hard to use, or takes a couple months, for me it took two days. Hence, 6 one way, half dozen the other. The first day I just messed with it, without directions. It was confusing. The second day, I read the directions, and by the end of the second day, I had already made three full length drum tracks, doing everything from customizing my entire drum set and sounds, making a bunch of patterns, and then piecing all those patterns together to make tracks. Ok, so now for what it can do: * I saw one review where they said you cannot change the length of the patterns. This is not true. You CAN indeed change the length of the patterns. You can use whatever tempo you want, 120, 140, whatever, and you can make the patterns 4 beats long, or 8, or 16, etc. * You can customize your own drum setup, so you have have a couple bass, etc. Rule of thumb if you are trying to re-create double bass, is to make two sounds, almost identical, BUT make the second sound a little different tonewise. Because in real life, you can tell the difference between both bass drums. This makes it sound more realistic. * There are a TON of different sound variations for every kind of drum sound you want. * You can tweak each individual sound. For instance, if I find a crash I like, but think to myself that I want it to sound softer, offset it to the right a little, change the pitch to a slightly lower pitch, and also make it ring on longer, ALL of this is possible. * Learning this machine really is not that hard. Can be done within a good weekend. All in all, this machine is amazing. I am a heavy metal guitarist, and I record my own tracks on a Tascam DP-02, and this works great in conjunction with that. This machine works very well with the metal genre, or rock, or any genre at all. It lets me put together full length tracks (from all of my combined patterns I made), does very very well using it in a double bass aspect (you can program the bass to sound like double bass, and as fast as you want), and you end up with very realistic sounding drum tracks! Since I play metal, this is VERY important, since it's hard to find a good drum machine that can go with the metal genre. Last, all I have to do is plug it into my Tascam recorder, and record! Love it! This sounds amazing! The one and ONLY downside to this is the fact that there is NO connection to connect it to your computer. I want to make this clear. There is a way to hook up through your instrument cable connections, but then I'm not sure how this hooks to your computer through a 1/4" cable connection. But all I have to do is record them into my Tascam, then send them to my computer, where I can save them for later. Hope this helps, and sorry about rambling. Any questions, feel free to comment and I will surely answer them for you the best I can, to help out.

I bought the SR-18 to replace my old Zoom RT-123 that finally started failing after over a decade of serving me well. I have a full computer recording setup with high quality drum plugins but I still love the vibe and hands-on immediacy of a good old-fashioned groove box, and the SR-18 does not disappoint. It sounds better than I expected, with a good selection of surprisingly decent acoustic kits, but it's those deliciously dated kits and samples I actually like the most. My philosophy is, if you're going to use a standalone drum machine these days, embrace its mechanical nature and look to software if realism is what you're after. My favorite features: Fully customizable drum kits. You can either edit a factory kit or start fresh by choosing from an awesome selection of basic samples and then tweaking volume, pitch, panning, envelope and other parameters to taste. Super flexible. Multiple parts/fills. For each sequence you get an A part, B part and a corresponding fill for each. Record a song live. In song mode you can hit record and the unit will capture your pattern changes and fills in real time, making it fun and easy to arrange entire songs. I much prefer this style of arranging to the tedious and time consuming step editing song mode of other machines, though that mode is still an option here if you prefer that workflow. Deeply customizable. I like how much control you get over every aspect of the machine, including very extensive midi settings which is great for me since I'm using this in conjunction with other synths and sequencers Onboard effects. They aren't anything fancy but the eq and compression effects are very useful. There are only a few useful reverb settings but those few sound good and are nice to have on hand. Drawbacks: There are a few drawbacks keeping me from giving the SR-18 five stars but they're minor and by no means deal breakers. No USB. This machine was released in the late 2000s as an update to it's predecessor, the SR-16. It really seems like oversight that they didn't include a USB port for midi communication and firmware updates. It's not a big problem but should have been a no-brainer Doesn't automatically save. If you're editing a pattern, song or kit and you turn off the machine without saving, your work is lost. It should save your work automatically and perhaps provide an undo function if you need to reverse any mistakes Settings don't always save. Some of my record settings and system settings seem to get lost when I tirn off the unit. This could be user error but the manual isn't clear if you need to manually save settings or not. Again, this should be automatic No dedicated "exit" button. It's easy to get buried in a menu and not quite know what mode the machine is in. It would help to have a dedicated cancel or exit button that gets you completely out of whatever context you're in Pad response. I find that I really have to pound on the pads to get higher velocities from them, and it shouldn't be that difficult. They should have included a setting for pad sensitivity so this could be tailored to the user's playing style. Perhaps the pads will get "broken in" over time as I continue to play on them Low output level. The line outputs are pretty quiet compared to the output of all my other line-level instrumens. An option to boost the output level would be nice. I have to boost it on my mixer instead Overall I'm in love with this little box and for the price and what it is you really get a ton of samples, kits, beats and options. It is also just plain fun! I can spend hours tapping out beats, tweaking kits and arranging songs. It is really helping as a songwriting tool because you can organize all your parts, even with bass lines, and then jam over it on guitar or keys to get ideas and try things out. Overall I highly recommend the SR-18

Very useful for composing song. I got it for special price at Amazon .

Cette drum machine est très bien! Les sons sont très bons. Il y a pas mal de bon rythmes. La programmation est différente des drums machines actuelles, mais elle fait son travail. Pour moi, c'est un bon achat.

O produto veio em total segurança, com uma qualidade incrível.

One of the best things I ever bought. Sounds great on my multitrack recordings and makes playing by myself a lot more fun when hooking it up to my amp's auxilliary input. Although many of the patterns aren't usable to me (hiphop or salsa crap), I've found that playing to some of the funk or industrial and other patterns has helped my lead guitar skills as it forces me to adapt and play things in ways that are different from what I usually play so it has also become a learning tool to me. After 3 or 4 weeks of using it, I feel I haven't even scratched the surface of its possibilities as I haven't even got into programming beats yet but the addition of a footswitch ( https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00U2Q8YU0/ref=cm_sw_r_taa_aXODybBFCJ70Y ) allowing me to switch from pattern A to pattern B during a song makes it a lot of fun.

Un ícono de las drum machines!! Me encanta, para el precio, la calidad de los samples es muy buena, la respuesta de los pads también lo es. Una hermana clásica para todo beat maker.