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.

This is just a huge sounding drum machine. Forget what they used to sound like years ago – this sounds like a real drummer – and a very good one at that. With the basslines added this machine can be used to back a singer / guitarist / keys player and you could go on the road solo (what I plan to do).

It can be complicated if you want to go the whole mile and programme it rather than use the sample tracks, but it comes with a very thorough instruction manual. Plan to learn how to do most of the good things during a month of tinkering with it in your spare time. I bought it with two Yamaha FC5 pedals to work it ‘live’.Yamaha FC-5 Sustain Pedal for Portable Electronic Keyboards (But it does work with other on/off pedals like the Yamahas as well.) This allows me to start stop and switch between A / B fills and A / B rhythms. You’ll need pedals like these if you plan to use this box in front of an audience – but you won’t need it for practice.

This is a great tool. And better than a drummer because it doesn’t have an ego, doesn’t need beer to fuel it, and I get to keep all the money from gigs. (I’ll do a video review soon.)

If you’re on a tight budget or want something a bit easier to programme, try the SR16. Alesis SR16 Drum Machine

I had the SR-16 and out of all the drum machines I ever owned it was the most user friendly so when I noticed the new SR-18 I had huge expectations, basically this is the same machine but they have made some very weird changes, my first complaint is you have to save every single thing that you do, they took this to the point of being completely ridiculous,every single edit you make must be saved I am not kidding. and then something weird; I noticed that whatever tempo you decide to play a pattern in it is automatically saved, one of the least important things (to me anyway) so now every pattern has it’s very own tempo, that just seems strange to me, one thing I liked about the SR-16 was when you wanted to change the length of a pattern you were give the option of taking bars off the end or the beginning, the SR-18 is like every other drum machine and you can only cut off the end, the SR-16 also had an output to dump all of your data onto a tape or cd (or whatever you prefer) so then you never run ot of memory, The SR-18 does not have this cool feature either,the sounds are good,lots of cool presets but drum machines still have a very long way to go before I will get too excited, I thought this was supposed to be an upgrade. ?