Okay, it’s time to get all music-geeky. I recently bought a software drum machine called iDrum. Why am I bothering you with this? Because it’s so much fun, dammit! As the promotional page for the product says:

Drum machine neophytes will get to experience the same magical 'instant-gratification' fun that hooked an entire generation of musicians on the hardware drum machines of yesteryear. Pros will find that there's simply no faster, easier way to access and manage large unwieldly drum sample libraries, get a phat beat going, and get it exported into the format you need.

It’s true. I’ve got a ton of drum samples recorded by the legendary Bob Clearmountain, as well as a bunch of TR-707 samples (one of the hardware drum machines alluded to), and no easy way to use them without going out and buying a full-blown sampler. iDrum makes it really easy to build custom kits from your own samples. Plus it comes with a nice collection of great sounds already installed.

More to the point, dear reader-who-may-have-had-a-sneaking-urge-to-play-with-music-on-his/her-computer, iDrum is dead easy to use. Check out the video—when the page comes up click on the iDrum Video Tutorial link on the right side of the page, because I can’t link directly to the movie. S’fun!

You can download a 10-day demo for free. If you decide to buy it, though, don’t get it directly from the Izotope site—they want $70 for a download, while I went down to the local MicroCenter and picked up a physical package for $50 (my beloved TR-707 was $250-300 back in the ’80s).

It’s not perfect, of course. For one thing, it only does 4/4 time on its own, though I believe if I set an odd time signature in Pro Tools or GarageBand it will force iDrum to only play part of a pattern before returning to 1. For bar lengths greater than 4 you can do the usual workarounds like halving the tempo and treating 32nds as 16ths and so forth. But I haven’t gotten around to trying this yet.

I’ve become a fan of Izotope products. I downloaded their free Vinyl plugin—now you can make your pristine digital audio sound like it’s coming off a beatup old turntable! And I recently bought their Ozone 64-bit mastering system. I’m looking forward to completing the PhD I will need to actually use that one….