Alesis SR-18 - Studio-Grade Standalone Drum Machine With On-Board Sound Library, Performance Driven I/O and In-Built Effects / Processors

The Alesis SR18 Drum Machine is amazing. I have had many problems with every computer based drum machine program. It's not that they didn't work right, but the fact that they just weren't for me. I am very good with computers, do photography editing, and music editing, etc, all on the few computers I own. As far as doing drums on my computer, It just wasn't clicking. Everyone has to find their path of least resistance, and THEIR best method for doing things, since everybody is different and everyone has their own path of least resistance. Hence, to each, their own. What works best and is the easiest for one person, may be the most complicated for the other. What is most complicated for you, may be the easiest for the other person.Basically what I am saying is this drum machine, once in my hands, really clicked. This was MY path of least resistance. It's good to know I can sit down with this machine, and only this machine, and make full drum tracks. As far as some people saying this is so hard to use, or takes a couple months, for me it took two days. Hence, 6 one way, half dozen the other. The first day I just messed with it, without directions. It was confusing. The second day, I read the directions, and by the end of the second day, I had already made three full length drum tracks, doing everything from customizing my entire drum set and sounds, making a bunch of patterns, and then piecing all those patterns together to make tracks.Ok, so now for what it can do:* I saw one review where they said you cannot change the length of the patterns. This is not true. You CAN indeed change the length of the patterns. You can use whatever tempo you want, 120, 140, whatever, and you can make the patterns 4 beats long, or 8, or 16, etc.* You can customize your own drum setup, so you have have a couple bass, etc. Rule of thumb if you are trying to re-create double bass, is to make two sounds, almost identical, BUT make the second sound a little different tonewise. Because in real life, you can tell the difference between both bass drums. This makes it sound more realistic.* There are a TON of different sound variations for every kind of drum sound you want.* You can tweak each individual sound. For instance, if I find a crash I like, but think to myself that I want it to sound softer, offset it to the right a little, change the pitch to a slightly lower pitch, and also make it ring on longer, ALL of this is possible.* Learning this machine really is not that hard. Can be done within a good weekend.All in all, this machine is amazing. I am a heavy metal guitarist, and I record my own tracks on a Tascam DP-02, and this works great in conjunction with that. This machine works very well with the metal genre, or rock, or any genre at all. It lets me put together full length tracks (from all of my combined patterns I made), does very very well using it in a double bass aspect (you can program the bass to sound like double bass, and as fast as you want), and you end up with very realistic sounding drum tracks! Since I play metal, this is VERY important, since it's hard to find a good drum machine that can go with the metal genre. Last, all I have to do is plug it into my Tascam recorder, and record! Love it! This sounds amazing!The one and ONLY downside to this is the fact that there is NO connection to connect it to your computer. I want to make this clear. There is a way to hook up through your instrument cable connections, but then I'm not sure how this hooks to your computer through a 1/4" cable connection. But all I have to do is record them into my Tascam, then send them to my computer, where I can save them for later.Hope this helps, and sorry about rambling. Any questions, feel free to comment and I will surely answer them for you the best I can, to help out.

I am teaching myself to play bass and wanted something more interesting to practice with than my metronome. I am also following Ed Friedland's Bass Groove book, which recommends using a drum machine.I vacillated between this and a software/computer/drum pad/dac setup. I'm really glad I chose this. It is a great one-box set up for practice and it has a ton of flexibility that makes it useful (and fun) in a variety ways I hadn't thought of initially. For practice, I plug the bass into the instrument input, my headphones into the output and away I go. I keep it powered up with rechargeable AA's that keep me going for several multi-hour sessions before I need to swap them out. Very portable, very compact.The drum sounds, as others have commented, are great - clear, crisp, realistic, and stereo! Over the headphones, it is great. The deeper bass and kick drum parts kick serious butt when amplified. The library has a nice balance of sounds that covers a large enough spectrum to keep me busy for a while. Programming is not hard if you actually read the manual and play with it a bit. For my purposes at this point, it has way more capability than I need.Bonus:- The multiple outputs are really cool. You can, for example, map the bass or percussion track to go out through the auxiliary channel, you can then run that part through a bass-synth or reverb pedal for example, and just have fun twiddling the dials. Very fun and sounds cool - and can make the bass samples come alive.- Although the bass sounds are pretty lame as many have pointed out, they give you something of a bass line sketch to work from. At my beginner level I find it is actually great to be able to slow the machine down to hear the note selection and timing of the bass parts. No, it's not Tony Levin, but for learning I am finding it gives me a great starting point. I can run it for awhile trying to follow it with the bass line turned on, then I can mute the bass part to see if I can keep up without the "teacher" or come up with variations that fit. Nice tool. Since you can make it almost arbitrarily slow, it really helps for being able to pick up the patterns.- Instrument input/headphone out. Nice touch. Volume knob works just on the drum going to headphones, you control instrument outboard so the volume is a really like a mix control.- Battery operation is great, and using rechargeables really sets you free.- The build is nice and solid. I've paid way more for way less.Features one could want this decade:- It's weird for a device sold in 2015 to not have USB or SD card support. No doubt that would raise the cost, but the midi Sysex dump process outlined in the manual for backing up user patterns and songs seems antediluvian. Heck, maybe they should have put an rs-232 serial console on it too while they were at it (smirk).- The ability to import sounds to extend the ROM package would be a nice feature in this day and age where a few gigs of flash ram costs a few dollars.To sum up, this is a great self-contained drum machine that gives you a lot of power, flexibility, and good sound for a not-ridiculous price. The world seems to have mostly moved on to software, and if you have already made the investments in time educating yourself and getting all the pieces to work together plus the money to get all those pieces (Midi pads, DAW, computer, DAC in/out), then the SR18 is probably redundant. But, if you just want to make some beats that sound really nice, keep them in your bag, and not get all complicated, then this thing is great.