Product: Novation DrumStation Rack
Price Paid: DEM 1100
Submitted
05/22/1998
at
05:05am
by
Heiko Rother
Email: h dot rother<at>switchboardmail dot com
Ease of Use
:
8
The Drumstation features two drumsets, 808 and a 909, both sound very realistic, no differences to Roland's original are audible. Editing the sounds is quite easy and goes far beyond the possibilities of the 808 and 909 boxes (any drum's pitches may be altered, attack and decay phases of most sounds are changeable and so on). Most parameters are editable by knobs on the frontplate
WARNING: When overloading the polyphony (8 notes), the instrument's behaviour gets unpredictable, even random! Avoid overloading by any circumstances!
They include a manual, it's well done and suffices for understanding the Drumstation and its use.
Features
:
8
The Drumstation is capable of playing eight notes at the same time. WARNING: Do not overload -- The results get random!
The distortion for any sound in any preset is adjustable, there are no additional FX except distortion.
Tweaking the knobs generates MIDI messages, so editing is recordable by a sequencer, supports nice realtime effects.
The possibilty of extracting MIDI timecode and supplying it to a DIN SYNC OUT jack allows synchronisation of a TB303 or similar. Very nice feature...
The Drumstation has NO builtin sequencer.
Expressiveness/Sounds
:
9
The drums really sound like the Roland TR808 and TR909 drums. There are no 'natural' drumsounds included. The drumstation is best used for music where naturality of drums is not essential, e.g. techno or dance.
Reliability
:
9
The Drumstation is very reliable and functions well. I found two bugs in its operating system: - random behaviour when exceeding polyphony - missing or ignored sounds when modifying 'Note On Recognition' parameter
I used it for liveact performances as standalone drumbox.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
- don't know-
Overall Rating
:
9
Nice thing at all. I don't regret having bought this one.
