What kind of drum machine is it?
If it's sample based with midi inputs, are you loading different sample maps for each song?
You may be able to copy your drum sequence data to some other device (sequencer) that doesn't have a 1 minute delay to load songs.

I don't know, maybe an ipod gaff taped to two di boxes is the most elegant solution. As previously mentioned: tear apart some 3rd party wired remote control for footswitchability. Use the "on-the-go" playlist to make your setlist.


Oh, and EMF? are you playing next to a nuclear testing site? Or are you worried that your band will accidentally cover "Unbelievable"?

It sounds like you're using an MPC-2000, correct?
gah. can't you expand that to use an external hard drive? if not ebay it. buy a drummer?
If you don't have a drummer, do you all look at the drum machine when there's a drum solo? That would be cool.

hbc wrote:What kind of drum machine is it?
If it's sample based with midi inputs, are you loading different sample maps for each song?
You may be able to copy your drum sequence data to some other device (sequencer) that doesn't have a 1 minute delay to load songs.

I don't know, maybe an ipod gaff taped to two di boxes is the most elegant solution. As previously mentioned: tear apart some 3rd party wired remote control for footswitchability. Use the "on-the-go" playlist to make your setlist.


Oh, and EMF? are you playing next to a nuclear testing site? Or are you worried that your band will accidentally cover "Unbelievable"?

I was wrong to type EMF. Sloppy. But I don't want to use an ipod that's going to go "DT DT DT DT DZZZZT DT" when someone's cel phone rings. While dropping the volume way down. So whatever kind of interference that is, I don't want it. This happens to my ipod in my car some times and I've had it happen on stage. Once.

Oddly enough, the more I think about it, the more I like the DJ CD player idea. You plug it into a wall, you can have XLR stereo out and these things can be pretty tough. I could even program in my own play order. Crude, but tough.

FWIW, I'm using a Boss DR 660 with an Alesis Datadisk ((c) 1989). I don't know enough about MIDI to figure if the 660 can hook up with some other MIDI device to get the job done. Maybe someone else knows. That's kinda why I posted.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, folk.

= Justin

I had pretty good performing results doing this sort of thing with a Sony portable CD player. It claimed to run 50 hours off a set of AAs, and most importantly had inbuilt shock protection. I stuck arrows on pointing at the play and skip buttons so I could find them easily, and it had a tiny backlit display which was enough. I think one show I used the headphone remote cable.

The backing tracks we recorded, I added three minutes of silence after the end of each song so that starting the next track was just a matter of hitting skip once. (Given how much our singer tended to waffle, next time I would add five minutes...) I made up a few CDs with different length sets on, partly as spares.

I rigged up some kind of box for it using its own cardboard packaging material, and velcroed a stereo DI box to the side. Not that pretty, but it worked. I'm sure it could be done better.

This would be a cheaper and smaller solution to your problem, and one less wall wart.

That percussive buzz usually will be interference between the cell phone and amplification circuits (I think). The ipod is sensitive to this, but not the only thing that suffers from it. One time I was doing sound for this really low key female vocal/acoustic act. The cell phone interference starts, and it is mega-loud. A group of people standing in front of the sound board turn and give me some of the most powerful "look of death" faces I've ever seen. The girl on stage says "Oh, sorry, that's mine!" and pulls the phone out of her pocket that's right behind her acoustic guitar's preamp.

Sorry for the digression, but I think that's a funny story.

Anyway, I think you could be able to set something up with a minimum of midi wrangling, and possibly buying nothing. What's the datadisk save? sysex dumps? On the DR-660 do you program a bunch of patterns and then save them into a song? Sorry about the million questions, (and the EMF joking around) just trying to help.

I have one of the new iPod classics. Except for it being awesome, I don't get those buzzes.

It happened more than once that I was listening to some stuff on the ipod and then my phone rang, or someone else's phone rang(I take the train everyday, twice). Anyhow, no buzzes.

Forgive me for asking a potentially stupid question, but couldn't you just play the beats straight from the drum machine instead of loading them onto a secondary device? I've play with a BOSS DR-670 and it lets you arrange the patterns you make like songs. I'm assuming you can do this with yours as well.

Though I'm guessing you might run into issues with the amount of space it has for your arrangements now that I think about it.

A Totem Pole wrote:Though I'm guessing you might run into issues with the amount of space it has for your arrangements now that I think about it.

This is the problem. One of our songs is usually in the neighborhood of 50 - 70 patterns and so maxes out the machine. Occasionally we've run out of room for the song that we're writing, but I'll usually just roll up my sleeves, go back and delete one of the 7 fill variations that we've come up with for a part of the song.

hbc wrote:Anyway, I think you could be able to set something up with a minimum of midi wrangling, and possibly buying nothing. What's the datadisk save? sysex dumps? On the DR-660 do you program a bunch of patterns and then save them into a song? Sorry about the million questions, (and the EMF joking around) just trying to help.

The datadisk does save sysex dumps. The dumps are a package of all the patterns we've programmed along with the sequence of those patterns specified by the song/songs. (We'll sometimes have more than one 'song' for a song if we want to change the time signature, tempo or just have something that's in smaller bites (easier to edit).) There are about 20 of these sysex dump files that will fit on a 720kb disk. Before we play, we'll download one of these onto the drum machine and it's ready to play that song. Song over, download the next one, wait a minute, and then it's ready for the next song.

Please don't apologize. I appreciate the help.

= Justin

So you're topping out the pattern limit for the drum machine. Maybe you could find a sequencer with enough memory to hold all yr songs. The $100 question is... do you use different drum kits on the roland for different songs, or is there one that you pretty much stick with? If you don't switch kits around from song to song, you could look into some hardware sequencers. There is a Roland MC-500 up on the bay right now, and it's pretty cool looking. This would save your note data, so you'd record each song from the 660 to the 500 and then use the 660 as just a sound bank, all the sequence data would be on the 500. Even if you do switch drum kits, I think there is a sysex message (way smaller than a whole dump) that can specify which kit you use. Some sequencers let you send a few sysex messages before a sequence kicks off. I'm not sure if the 500 can do this, I'm only suggesting it because it is clearly the coolest looking hardware sequencer:



pic from vintagesynth.com. They have a link for the manual there too.