Trap beats and the state of Hip Hop

I'm guessing you'd would have made better use of it than I did. Coming from drum machines, I found it a bit overwhelming.

Neodymium wrote:I'm guessing you'd would have made better use of it than I did. Coming from drum machines, I found it a bit overwhelming.

The hardest part for me was the terminology really. In 96, I was a 'baby' when it came to sequencing. A friend had the SY85, another had a Korg T3, I had my SR-16 back then and later got an N364 around 97/98 (terrible first synth haha). When I got Cakewalk, sequencing was pretty easy to figure out (I came from 'classical music' training in school band playing trumpet/clarinet/tenor sax), it was just sheet music basically but with blocks instead of notes. MIDI wasn't too bad as I knew the concept of tracks and whatnot from playing guitar, 4 tracking, the engineering classes I took etc.. Moving around the Yamaha and Korg sequencers took some work, but I had that step sequencing down in no time on the Korg!

When I finally got my own sampler, was around 2000/2001. Sam Ash was blowing out the S2000s for $150 and I bought one brand new hah. That was MUCH easier to get around by that time. I later got an ESI4000 Turbo all maxed out and had to fight between the two. They both did the same shit but use different terms for the same thing so it was a bit tough to translate between the two (example, Akai uses 'Layer's and 'Zones' where EMU uses 'Voices' and 'Groups').. Nowdays I can do it in my sleep pretty much. Thanks to the guy behind the EMU.tools website, he made the web editor a standalone java app, so now I don't need to bend down in front of my rack to work with it too.

I'm still on Cakewalk, just the 3 decades

My Drum and Bass name was Sonar, so when Cakewalk became Sonar I felt I had to drop that. It's become Sonar once again.