Hi there,
Yes, I am a professional. I am currently the musician in a Black Baptist church and struggling somewhat because I come from a White Pentecostal background.... I'm not struggling with the church, I'm struggling with everything being in Eb. Bb. Ab etc. and how to incorporate the gospel chord styles. I learned to play with guitarists - so my strong keys are E, A, B (believe it or not).
Anyway - gordonk47 - there are some options for drums. I was going to recommend the Alesis Drum machine, because it sounds great. But you're right about programming it - it's a drag and it's hard to get a "real" drummer feel to the beats that you do program.
What I have used in the past (and had the best luck with) is a MiniDisc player that I would record real drum loops into. I would record track 1 to be the first song, track 2 for the second song and so on. I would record a 4 beat count-in click then follow it with a loop of the drum pattern. Then I just had to hit FF button to the next song then hit play. Worked great.
The problem with a drum machine is that you have to call up pattern number THEN set the tempo and make sure it's set on the right "kit" then hit start - you know the routine. BUT if you hit one wrong button (pattern, song, tempo) you're in serious trouble - this will usually happen in front of the whole church (and it has).... aarrrrgghh!
So anyway, I used real drum loops, recorded into my MiniDisc player. If the song is 3 minutes long I would record 5 or 6 minutes of the drum loop just to be sure I had enough.
http://www.betamonkeymusic.com/Has some real good deals.
Also SuperLoops if you buy it on eBay you will get a good deal. SuperLoops sounds more punchy, BetaMonkey has tighter grooves. Each CD will give you hundreds of grooves to choose from and you can usually find what you want with 2 or 3 CD’s
The downside to using a MiniDisc playback is that there is no way to put in fills.
You could also output the loops into a WAV file and burn a CD then play it back with a portable CD player. This would be less expensive than buying a MiniDisc recorder.
I used Zero-X (software) to set up the drum loops but you could also use CoolEdit, or a variety of other audio edit progs. Then I plugged my Minidisc recorder into the soundcard and recorded the drum loop playing over and over.
The drum machine that I had the best luck with was a BOSS Dr. Rhythm DR-770 because you could set up the footswitch to retrigger to the beginning of the pattern. So when the choir got off tempo, I could retrigger the drum machine to get back in synch with the choir.
If you get a drum machine make sure it has GM (General MIDI) mapping. The Alesis does NOT have this, but you can program it (sort of) to accept GM patterns (kind of). There are a ton of MIDI drum patterns on the Internet. If you want a program where all the beats are organized (and there are hundreds of beats) - laid out nicely and easy to find what you're looking for:
www.drumtrax.comThe DrumTrax beats are a little dated (like 1980) and you're not gong to find anything exotic on that prog. But is is easy to locate the patterns with.
You should be able to download some WAV drum loops for free, run them through some looping software and output a WAV file to burn to a CD (all for free) and see if this set-up will work for you before you spend any money on something that's not going to do what you want.
Hope this helps and God Bless,
Ashton
