Drums on the Music 4000 keyboard

David Westbrook

This is a little program I've found useful for trying out drum parts. It was inspired by Richard Bettis's keyboard split program (AMPLINEX 007) and needs a Music 4000 keyboard.

My program uses Richard's technique (in the word 'splitact') to allocate 8 drum sounds to different parts of the Music 4000 keyboard, thus giving you an easily accessible 'drum kit' to play with. When you've found a nice drum pattern you can then record the parts separately as usual - provided you can remember them!

When the program 'U.DrumKey' is loaded and run, it splits the keyboard into 8 groups of notes, each group producing a different instrument. The title display gives you a rough idea of where each instrument is. In all cases except the toms, the sound is of a constant pitch, so it doesn't matter which key in the group you hit. The toms are tuned, so each key in this group does produce a different pitch.

As Richard explained, the more groups the keyboard is split into, the slower the response. My eight-fold split is really pushing it a bit, so if you hit more than one drum simultaneously you'll notice a distinct lag. However, I don't find this too disturbing and I think it's worth it for the range of sounds. If you disagree, it's fairly easily changed to have less voices: look at 'splitact' and 'setkit'. Have fun!

Related file on this disc:

U.DrumKey - Music 4000 drum kit utility