Swing on Krome - Drum Tracks.

[billbaker]

At the Kronos forum I raised the subject of swing on the Kronos's Drum Track function. I find that the capability to add low % swing humanizes many rhythm tracks (on my Tritons) and is essential for many dance genres.

Unfortunately, Kronos doesn't appear to have DT swing parameter.

Neither does Krome.

However, while there appears to be no way to apply swing to drum tracks directly there is a work around. Write tracks to sequencer, apply swing there, and save resulting swung sequence as a User Drum Track pattern. Not an elegant solution, but one that would work.

The better news, on the Krome at least, is that while there's no way to swing a Drum Track, something like 200 Drum-centric Arpeggiation patterns are included (over and above the Drum Track patterns) and those can be altered quickly and directly by using the arp section's swing function -- doing so puts you back in triton territory as far as accompanying tracks/arps go, but that's no worse than where I am now (still pretty happy with my Triton Extreme).



BB

[icarusi]

The better news, on the Krome at least, is that while there's no way to swing a Drum Track, something like 200 Drum-centric Arpeggiation patterns are included (over and above the Drum Track patterns) and those can be altered quickly and directly by using the arp section's swing function -- doing so puts you back in triton territory as far as accompanying tracks/arps go, but that's no worse than where I am now (still pretty happy with my Triton Extreme).

I wondered about that. At first I thought it was an either/or, which I suppose it is really unless you want to run 2 drum tracks in parallel. I haven't checked but is the arp drum track accessing all the same drum samples and the dedicated drum-track?

[icarusi]

However, while there appears to be no way to apply swing to drum tracks directly there is a work around. Write tracks to sequencer, apply swing there, and save resulting swung sequence as a User Drum Track pattern. Not an elegant solution, but one that would work.

Probably the better idea in the long run as you can make longer 'realistic' drum tracks with a few varied fills rather than relying on Korg's which have no length indication.

[billbaker]

Icarusi,

"...is the arp drum track accessing all the same drum samples and the dedicated drum-track?"

By all indications the answer is YES. Since you can set up drum track to use any of the on-board kits, any sample that the kits use is also useable by the drum track.

Of course you have to realize that the drum tracks are really centered around just 6 or 7 samples (BD, SD, OHH, CHH, Tom 1-2-3, Crash, Ride) per kit / per pattern - so if you wanted to make sure that a particular sample was represented then writing your own user kit would be the way to go. Transposing (+1/-1) doesn't always yield a useable result, and the multi-sample you want may be out of range of the played notes of the drum track.

- - - - - -

My initial line of questioning was an attempt to squeeze out some extra usability from the drum track. For any given track, being able to run it straight, at a 5-12% swing (looser "house" swing), and at 30% (triplet swing) gets you 3 very different sounding patterns.

I've had a lot of luck generating combis that use these settings within Triton's double-arp architecture and was looking forward to seeing how the drum tracks might be tweaked in Kronos or Krome.

Krome retains the double-arp set-up, so some flexibility is there - tho' not DT.

Kronos can add swing under KARMA, but the associated DT remains as written (i.e., straight while Kronos swings).

I wanted to have the option of +/- swing as I saw fit... with some degree of integration with arps or KARMA, if possible.


BB

[icarusi]

Kronos can add swing under KARMA, but the associated DT remains as written (i.e., straight while Kronos swings).

I wanted to have the option of +/- swing as I saw fit... with some degree of integration with arps or KARMA, if possible.

Seems like the DT playout data is in some higher compressed format than the arps, so they can all be kept in the limited non-volatile onboard memory. It's a bit of an egg having arps to swing but not DTs.

There's a whiff of 'legacy' all over the Krome. it's 4S rather than a 5 in iPhone terms.