I’ve tried my best to find a video about this, but my god, YouTube search gets notably worse each time I use it, to the point of it being almost completely useless now.
I understand the LM Drum has a variable sample rate. Does this mean that you can hear the effect that the variable sample rate has on the audio as you monitor a signal before you sample it, or do you need to sample something before the effect becomes apparent?
Sample rate is via bit reduction so the latter.
Bloody hell that was quick, cheers shigginpit!
I had high hopes for this one…
Certainly looks like a very capable machine, but yeah I have to say I’m a bit disappointed about it not being able to let you hear the effect on the audio while it it’s being monitored and adjusted.
Not related, but I just saw a video where you can even play it chromatically via a MIDI keyboard. That would pretty much make it be able to function as a stand-alone workstation, because even the samples can be looped and used as instruments. I suppose the spanner in the works with that one though is a lack of polyphony when playing chromatically, or is that not the case?
It’s nothing like what you’re thinking. Trust me on this, I wanted to love it.
This machine has a lot of things standing in the way of using it as anything other than a drum machine which you don’t see on paper.
Did you know that the instrument pad groupings can’t be separated from the sample you assign? What I mean is if there are 3 tom pads or 3 hi hat pads (there are 3 of each) they all have to have the same sample.
The groupings are not separable, you can’t repurpose those pads for multiple one-shots, the only thing you can change between those pads which are stuck with the same sample is the base pitch of that pad and what would be the point of changing the pitch on individual pads when you can play it chromatically?
So, the 3 snare pads, the 3 toms, the 3 hi hats etc, anything where it looks like you can use those pads for more one-shots, they can only be assigned 1 sample as a group which plays any time you hit one of those pads.
There’s a ton of wasted real estate and there are a bunch of other things that I could add to strengthen my point, however suffice to say that the machine is ill suited for a sampling workflow.
I really wanted to like it.
Also, prepared samples sounded good but I found that anything I sampled straight to the machine sounded pretty meh, which for me 90% of my interest was in the sound of the converters and direct sampling.
It’s the only piece of hardware that I’ve returned within the return window in probably 10 years, maybe longer than that.
I really appreciate the detail, thanks for that!
I won’t be buying the LMDrum. I only got interested in it after looking at the workflow of the analogue RD-8 and RD-9. It’s not impossible I would have bought an LMDrum if it had done exactly what I want, but it clearly doesn’t, and as with yourself, for me the sampling aspect was a very important part of it.
It would have been way down the line anyway, because out of the three machines, I want the RD-8 the most, followed by the RD-9. If I sell some gear I might even buy both. But nah, not interested in the LMDrum, not now anyway.
Basicallly, I’m changing-up my gear a bit. I’m still wittling it down to the perfect workflow for my particualr needs. You know from the other thread I bought a lot of SPs recently. Well I love them all, but in hindsight I think I made some wrong decisions for my particular needs.
As you probably gathered in the SP thread, I’m getting far more joy out of pairing the SP-202 up to the Yamaha MT50 than I am with any other combination. Seriously, I cannot enthuse about that combo enough, but it means the other gear is just not getting used at all.
So I might sell my SP-303 and SP-404A and use it to fund an RD-8 and RD-9, because the idea is to be left with a minimal setup that is pure analogue, apart from the SP-202 and an Empress Reverb, which is another thing I keep drooling over and am just going to have to cough-up for eventually.
Sounds weird to some I suppose, but I’m sure we all know that until we actually get our hands on the gear we lust after, we never really know if the workflow is right until we pair this with that.
I feel like I have the opposite of GAS. I don’t want lots of gear, I just want a system that works for me, and I’ve learnt the hard way that the best way for me to go is to have equipment that is each dedicated to a specific task.
Having a dedicated drum machine for drums is a perfect example of that really.
If you found a workflow that works for you and inspires you, you just have to work towards fine tuning that arrangement and making it a reality. The hard part is admitting when things aren’t working, especially when we become financially (or emotionally) invested in something which appears, on the surface, to be exactly what we want.
The devil’s in the details, as they say.
True, and even harder is selling stuff and then wishing you hadn’t 
I do that often and I can pretty much guarantee that if I sell the SP-303 and SP-404A, I will later regret it. I kinda know that even before I sell them. If pushed, I could afford an RD-8 and RD-9 without selling any of them, but at the same time it’s hard to hang on to stuff I’m just not using, and fact is, the only SP I am using is the SP-202.
Anyway, I intend to download the manuals for the RD-8 today. I just need to make sure that I can sequence my SP-202 directly from the RD-8 via MIDI. I assume I can do that, but I’m curious how MIDI mapping works.
If all goes well with the MIDI implementation then I’ll be buying an RD-8. I could even use the back-up banks of the SP-202 to store Linn Drum, DMX, and Symmons drum machine samples, and trigger them from the RD-8, so in effect, my SP-202 can double as a digital drum sound module, and be programmed in exactly the same way directly from the RD-8 Like I said though, that will all depend on how versatile the MIDI mapping on the RD-8 is.
If it works the way I’m hoping it will then, wow, nice!
Make sure you really research that. I’m not convinced that the behringer midi sequencing is very capable, and midi implementation on the LMdrum was very light so you’ll have to do your homework on the RD8.
I’ve sequenced my 202 pretty extensively from digitakt (also MPC but usually digitakt or I use it standalone) and I can tell you from my experience it sounds pretty choppy when you try and sequence individual one shot drum hits which is why I tend to record drum loops into it and maybe have a single one shot which I use as an accent to double the snare or something. It’s just not audibly pleasing to hear the natural machine noise cutting in and out. doesn’t bother me as much to hear it in a steady fashion when it’s playing continuously, but when it hits then goes silent it’s not the kind of sonic degradation that I’m looking for. It’s not the artistic kind, so to speak.
Anyways, do your research and good luck! By the way, I recently was reading that the cymbals and hats on the RD-9 are actually digital PCM samples so if all analog really matters to you, make sure you look into those details on the RD-8 as well. Hopefully you can reach a nice compromise with an analog drum machine that has some decent sequencing capabilities.
Pretty sure the cymbals and hats on the 909 are samples too, it’s what was allegedly holding up the release of the RD9 a few years back.
Not worried about that. The setup I have in mind is a hybrid of analogue and digital, although I’m going mainly for analogue and using digital where I think it shines. If you couple that sort of thinking with a dedicated machine per task workflow, then you get a better idea of what I’m aiming for.
I’ve just been reading the RD-8 manual, and the good news is both the send an receive channels are settable independently, and so is the drum voice MIDI mapping. On paper at least it should easily be able to do what I’m wanting, in fact it’s spec-perfect in that respect.
When you say “Choppy”, what do you mean exactly, do you mean choppy timing, or do the samples start playing choppy?
Seems a bit strange that does, especially as BOSS themselves specifically intended the SP-202 to be sequenced, for example by their own DR-202. You might have a copped for a picky SP-202 I suppose, but I’m very curious what you meant.
I’ll send you a message with a better explanation so that we don’t clog up the LMdrum thread.
Cheers shigginpit, and by the way my apologies to all if I disturbed the thread!
I’ve had my lm 2 months…I love it… just got a second hand digitakt today…. I need more sample memory and idea is to use digitakt to sample mixes from lm drum etc
Remarkably quiet in here 
Came in to see how people were getting on with it after seeing the new BMX Drum demo on YT. Is this another Liven Lo Fi 12 situation, bunch of initial hype and then on to other things?
I think some people are enjoying it. I returned the one that I preordered after about 3 weeks with it. It had a number of issues and limitations that aren’t called out in print which made it difficult to love. Also I did not think that sampling via the inputs sounded very good which was half of why I was hopeful about this one.
I’ve considered giving it another chance because imported samples sound good on the behringer playback engine, but somehow the audio input just did not produce good sounding samples for me.
The UI is really easy to understand if you’ve used an elektron device, but they just made it look like the elektron UI, a lot of simple stuff is in setup menus with scroll through parameters instead of controlled by the forward-facing UI.
The combination of wasted real estate, jumpy encoder, really mediocre sounding filter section, clumsy sequencer etc. all added up to a below passing score for me. Also, the pitch algorithm is terrible. I loved that you could play a sample chromatically, but it sounds awful and the farther you deviate from the base tone the worse it sounded to me.
Also pitching samples up to save recording length and then pitching them down on the device itself after recording them into the inputs sounded really poor compared to other lofi samplers I’ve used. The range of pitch up and down is fine as there is quite a bit of wiggle room but when I pitched it back to standard on the device it sounded awful.
Definitely possible some of these things could be tidied up in a firmware upgrade but for me it wasn’t going to do the trick. The input sound is just the hardware they used, which I thought would be a good thing but in this case I just did not hear what I was hoping to hear.
As a drum machine only and with the onboard samples or your own samples it sounds good, or at least it did to me.
For them to not make all pads freely assignable is basically crippling the machine though. Having 3 pads with the same sample at different pitches is totally redundant and even if something similar were on the original, their sequencer is all a product of digital code and so I’m pretty sure that they did not need to implement the pad’s sample assignment in such a meaningless way. It’s really wasted real estate to not be able to use all the pads for different samples (per pad).
There were enough changes from the original Linndrum that I don’t think keeping it original is really a sufficient excuse. More like bad project management but where most of the departments working under that management accomplished and did what they were asked.
i think the issue for me with the behringer clones is if you want a given machine’s sound you have to get the whole machine. i don’t have that much space, much as i’d also like an 808, Linn Drum, DMX to work with. I can just as easily replicate the ones i need in MPC and stay with the RD-9 as my base rhythm machine
Very happy with mine
aside from the individual volumes, and panning controls for 16 active elements: what can the lm drum do that i can’t do with an octatrack?
i guess the lm drum has full tracks per musical element?
is there a way to do the “randomized sample start” of the hi-hat that the linn drum pioneered?
(the reason i ask is that i want to try to create an LM Drum Octatrack project, would love anyone else’s feedback!)