Alesis SR-18 Drum Machine

Great preset's. Easy to use and great for practice which I purchased it for.

The Alesis SR-18 is a welcome update to the now classic SR-16. The sample library is very extensive, ranging from acoustic to electronic sounds. Honestly you could definitely write a full track off this unit and this unit alone with some creative sequencing and the help of a DAW. The SR-18 sounds are wonderfully editable with pitch adjustment up and down an octave, low-pass non-resonant filtering, and probably most importantly decay editing. The onboard compression/EQ processing options sound quite good and the reverb algorithms are actually stellar in my opinion as well. They really deliver amazing & lush sounding standard reverbs as well as more washed out or effecty type algorithms. The onboard sequencer is easy to use but a little tiresome. Sequencing from a computer is much better for getting the nuances of off-the-grid looseness. If you wanted to gig with it you could program in the DAW and then record unquantized straight in to keep your original computer programmed feel. The only real downside to this unit and it's somewhat irksome is that the sample library isn't organized super intuitively. Alike samples aren't always grouped together so if you're looking for which clap to use for instance, you can't just browse all the options in series. Apart from that the samples are really quite useable and even the bass/synth sounds are pretty interesting too, even if they don't have any real-time control. The SR-18 does so much to enhance the SR-16 that I really hope we get a similar & unexpected leap to what Alesis does in its hopeful next upgrade.

Used for home studio recording. Easy set-up and easy to program your own beats.

The SR-16 on steroids! This thing has BASS sounds so you can make your own backing track, just add vocals and/or guitar. If hip-hop is your thing, this can make killer beats to rap over. Techno beats are also at hand. Tons of drum and percussion and bass sounds. Maybe rename the unit "The Beatmaster" ha My advice is to play with the unit as long as you can without going into the manual, but you will eventually. I found the quick start guide helpful. Initial quality is excellent. This is an exciting unit so far, but I have just scratched the surface.

To provide the basis for recording on my home studio.

Use this for practicing. It is fairly easy to use. Like the stock beats and the variety. The builtin bass is nice to have for the stock tracks but haven't figured our how to change the key easily yet. Can also disable it. The sound is great and is much better than my old HR16.