Recording - January 2011 - 38

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recording. Remember that the Undo functions on these boxes are limited to the most recent recording operations, and there’s only one level of Undo and Redo, so it makes sense for the buttons only to appear when there’s actually something you can undo! Boom chuck Zoom has been making rhythm machines for many years, and was among the first, if not the first, to incorporate them into other audio devices as added features, e.g. placing a rhythm-track player inside a guitar effects processor to provide backing tracks for the player. The rhythm machine in the R24 combines good sounds and a nice selection of premade patterns with basic editing options using the graphic LCD. The front panel of the R24 now offers eight non-velocitysensitive sound trigger pads. The graphic LCD offers a Rhythm Pattern Sequencer view for a quick graphic overview of where your hits are in your pattern; you can quickly edit, delete, and import patterns, select from ten drum kits (eight acoustic and two electronic, my favorites being the very boomy Live kit and the 808-inspired Urban kit), and tweak the kit’s level and pan perspective (drums placed left to right from a player’s or the audience’s listening position). Patterns can be programmed by playing pads in real time or by single-step programming through the pattern. They can be saved with the audio in a Project and shared

between Projects if you feel like reusing them.You can program rolls on any pad, but this function is accessed through a bit of menu diving, along with pattern length settings, time signatures, and so on. You can’t edit the individual levels of drums in a pattern, though, nor can you treat specific instruments with effects while leaving others dry. Loop the loops The sequencing features for rhythm sounds are also used with the onboard sampler. You can import loops from a computer or from an attached USB drive; the R24 comes with a 2 GB USB drive preloaded with a variety of excellent loops.You can also record your own material and turn it into loops. Any imported audio can quickly be set to loop or play through once with the Repeat/Stop pad under the Master fader. Looped material can be edited and trimmed with a cramped but reasonably usable graphic editor on the R24; this is a first for these machines, and I am hoping that in a future generation it will be adapted to let users do edit operations on recorded tracks as one might in a larger desktop recorder (cut, paste, insert, etc.). You can assign an audio file or loop to each of the pads (so you can work with up to 24 at a time, noting that stereo loops take two adjacent tracks), and play the pads in real time or use a step-by-step programming method like the rhythm machine’s to build up tracks to your taste. You can insert and delete steps, change time signature, and play back multiple audio loops as well as the internal rhythm sounds, all stored within a Project. If you want to change the overall tempo of the loops in your tracks, there is now a global time stretch function that has two different algorithms for beat-based or sustained-tone music. It doesn’t sound as clean as the very best time stretching you’ll
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Recording - January 2011

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