Rocking out with Drambo

I post this as a little appreciation and perhaps for someone to stumble upon on the internets for a perhaps less usual usage of Drambo.

Finally have been able to get back to playing some rock and roll (ya vaccines). Had my first practice with Drambo last night.

I am mainly singing and playing bass. But what an amazing time to be alive that I can have this tiny rig that does more than a wall of samplers, sequencers, synths and effects of my youth.

I also wanted to remark on how easily I got all this together. You expect any app with the complexity of Drambo to have some learning curve. And I'm sure there are ways I will use it that I haven't figured out yet. Granted I have pretty advanced understanding of effects and mixing, know Ableton well, and have a middling understanding of modular environments.

But for the purposes I used it initially to add to the rock and roll rehearsal last night, I probably spent more time modifying this cymbal stand to be a nice table for the setup than I did learning how to:

-set up samples for finger drumming with effects mapped to knobs

-add some synth voices and modulate some parameters that the au3s don't natively let you modulate

-set up a spoken word sample with pitch bending and combo filter wankery (xy pads)

-sequence some randomized but in key backing drones

-set up some of these things into different patterns for different parts of the song

-hide stuff to make perfect little live Compact view performance boxes

-all w/ tap tempo from my Akai to keep in line with the drummer

Simply, Drambo uses conventions that are intuitive. I didn't read the manual. I understand what most lol of the components are suppose to do and once I had read the basic 'cables are usually automatic, stuff flows left to right' I intuited the rest.

I've only had Drambo a week and it was already a delight to the band.


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