ielectribe, Radias, Spectralis... drum machine-ing

[acemonvw]

Hey guys,

So, I've been updating my setup, rearranging, etc. and have come to an impasse. I like the idea of synthesized drum sounds as opposed to PCM based sounds. I've been using both my Spectralis for drums as well as the Radias... While the Spectralis has amazing filters, the sampling means things like hi-hat sounds won't cut-off when the closed hi-hat hits (unless you do work-arounds) and in general, while I like the sequencing of the spectralis, the internal sounds just aren't very exciting (yes you can import other sounds).

I have the ielectribe and just started messing around with sequencing its drum sounds from the spectralis. I have also done so with the radias, but what I enjoy about something like electribes is that it's synthesized drums, you can lengthen/shorten sounds easily and create something very unique.

My questions, which may be very subjective, for the knowledgeable community are as follows:

How does the sound of the ielectribe compare to the actual electribe (excluding features like more fx, etc)? I would imagine the actual electribe has better D/A converters...

Anyone ever really use the drum sounds from the Radias? I would suspect that that too has better D/A converters than the ielectribe and might be a better alternative for drums.

Any thoughts or comments on the subject?

Thanks!

[X-Trade]

iElectribe sounds way better than the original ER-1 that it is based upon. It has more effects and motion sequence options too.

The more modern EMX and ESX though both use sampled drums - on the EMX they are ROM like the drum samples on the Radias. On the ESX they are user replaceable samples which is quite flexible and you can always synthesize drums on some module then sample them to the ESX. It's a very versatile module as both drum machine and entire backing production station.

The Radias also offers very detailed drum synthesis. It's not just samples, but entire synth voice for each drum part. But unlike on iElectribe and the ER1, it's not laid out in a way that is designed for drum synthesis (like ADSR is not very useful for drums, you only need to us AD and possibly R), so you have to understand better what you are doing. But I would certainly say if offers the most flexible drum synthesis I've seen in a module.

Modern DACs are fairly transparent and I don't think they really have that much to do with the sound. The parameters and synthesis engine are more important. The old ER1 for example has very limited synthesis, but perhaps the most defining factor for the sound character is that it runs at 32KHz which seems to result in a much muddier sound quality.

[acemonvw]

Huh, I had NO IDEA that you could modify the drum parts individually!!! I just started messing with that. It didn't appear though, that you can extend the Release for each part to play longer... at least I didn't notice any change. This is still pretty neat and yeah, it's on page 112 in the manual

I suppose if I like a sound, I can just copy it into the spectralis, but that just sounds like a lot of work to record the sound into the DAW and export it in the spectralis program, and then export it to the spectralis itself... it's a tedious process. I'll probably just play around with the ielectribe and the radias to determine which is more useful as the drum machine.

Sometimes I think of just getting rid of the radias from my setup altogether, but... I cannot make my spectralis or my Virus have as good of a bass patch (I use the Wah effect to give it a really nice punch, just can't get that elsewhere!).

Thanks for the information!!! There's not much documentation or questions about sound quality of the ipad apps vs their originals (at least for the electribes)... it's usually people wondering which they should buy, but since I already have the ielectribe, it would be nice to try to actually use it in my music...

Thanks!!!