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#167568 - 09/03/02 02:43 PM Squeak - elektron Machine Drum arrived
freddynl Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 11/17/99
Posts: 1150
Loc: netherlands
As promissed a small first impression.

Handling order;
Ordered last friday aug 30th
Arrived today by fedex sept 3rd
I consider this is a well deserved 10.

Condition;
Undammeged , solid steel case, buttons allthough a bit smaller is a simular button system as the old TR series of Roland (I had a couple of them and yes I know I shouldn't have sold them )
One of the corners of the front (aluminium) a bit sharp, clearly handmade. (love that, handmade I mean )
The overall look is good, so nothing to complain.

At boot up I saw V1.11 , which means it came with latest O/S.
Allthough this looks like not so important, it does to me as it says "the designers stand behind their product and care for their customers"

LCD;
It's RED.
This was the one which worried me a bit as I have some problems with reading small LCD's.
Now that surprised me a lot, even under an angle of roughly 45o it's well readable.
If it was bigger I would rate this a 10, but it is a bit small, so a 9.

Ease of use;
Absolutely a 10!
Without reading the manual I was able to find most of the features of the machine.
Now I could not find the sequencer, so I decided to read the part of the sequencer.
Very well explained and reading took me 5 secs to press the wright buttons.
Here's another 10 for the manual!

Sounds;
I plugged it into my mixer thru the stereo main outs and played back all the standard kits loaded.
Sounds are good and up to date, typically the todays electronic drumsounds.
Much better as the demo on their website and on parr with the kits in my K2600.
Tried some tweaking on individual instruments, now here comes the real power.,
Any individual instrument can be changed and
has, pitch,decay,ramp,rdec(speed of pitch ramp),noise(adds noise),harmonics(adds extra harmonics)moduation etc...
There's a master FX for the stereo outs as well containing modulation,Hfrq,echo , level etc...
You can built your own kits from scratch or edit the standard sounds on board, and store them in the user banks (64 totally)
This is all done by knobs and works very fast.
All data can be transferred and stored on PC/Mac thru midi.
This is the part I did not try out yet, as it's not yet connected to midi.
So if any problems here occur I will inform you later..

I will now start reading the manual

Fred
_________________________
Keyboards/Sound Units: Kurzweil 2600S, Roland VR-760, Acces Virus C, Roland G-800, Akai AX60, Minimoog, Machine Drum, Roland R8-M, mediastation x-76

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#167569 - 09/03/02 03:44 PM Re: Squeak - elektron Machine Drum arrived
squeak_D Offline
Senior Member

Registered: 10/08/00
Posts: 4715
Loc: West Virginia
Wow! I knew this would be a killer machine... Good start for a review... Please keep me posted and thanks...

Squeak
_________________________
GEAR: Yamaha MOXF-6, Casio MZX-500, Roland Juno-Di, M-Audio Venom, Roland RS-70, Yamaha PSR S700, M-Audio Axiom Pro-61 (Midi Controller). SOFTWARE: Mixcraft-7, PowerTracks Pro Audio 2013, Beat Thang Virtual, Dimension Le.

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