Changing the character
Sometimes you want drum 'n bass, sometimes you want death metal.
The main window carries four sliders and a switch while Drums is playing.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Energy | How hard the machine plays, with a stick pushed all the way out. |
| Dynamics | The range between the quiet hits and the accents, with a stick pushed all the way out. Turn it down to flatten it out, up to widen it. |
| Swing | Pushes the offbeat hits late. Straight at zero, full triplet feel at the top. |
| Snare offset | Where the snare lands against the rest of the kit: up to 12ms ahead or behind. |
| Half-time | The drums play at half the tempo. |
Sticks under the sliders
The sliders set what a stick pushed all the way out plays. Easing a stick in brings its part down under the Energy setting, by about a third at the most, and widens the gap between its quiet strokes and its accents. Pushed all the way out again it plays at the sliders' settings. The left stick does this for the hi-hat, the right stick for the kick, and with Backbeat set to Manual the right trigger does it for the snare. The four buttons and the d-pad always play at the sliders' settings.
Dynamics and tempo
The dynamics also follow the tempo on their own. Slow grooves get more depth between the quiet strokes and the accents, and fast ones compress up toward the accents. The middle of the slider is what the machine plays anyway.
Swing
Swing holds the offbeats back towards a triplet, and which offbeats it moves depends on the tempo: at slow tempos it's the 16ths, from about 105bpm up it's the 8ths. The whole kit swings together, kick and snare with the hat.
Snare offset
Zero is the grid. Pull it left and the snare sits ahead of the kick and the hat, push it right and it drags behind them. It moves every snare hit: the backbeat and the d-pad figures.
Half-time
With the switch on, the drums run at half the song's tempo, so their bar spans two of yours and you get the figures they would play at that slower tempo. At 170bpm in half-time you get the 85bpm kit: the kick rates, the hat figures and the snare figures, all at 85. Holding the left bumper stacks on top of it.
Other drum settings
Everything else lives in the settings window: the Backbeat setting - Automatic, on a stick pushed all the way out, or Manual on the right trigger - in Settings → Instruments → Drums, and the four notes and the channels in Settings → MIDI → Output.