midi keyboard for drums

Rich i do that all the time, I use sound fonts and play thru them, I bought a font set called Blue Jay Drums from a company called Sonic Implants. Very good sounding professionally recorded samples i use my old keyboard and play da drums!!

One of the usb midi keyboards would work fine? They're pretty cheap. Rich.

Rich,

A MIDI keyboard will just send electronic signals. The sounds are housed either in the sound card's internal synth, or a computerized soft synth. (The exception, of course, would be using something like a Yamaha keyboard that has sounds built in and MIDI, although I'm not a huge fan of Yamaha's low-end PCR sounds). I've got an M-Audio Keystation 61es and an Evolution eKeys. The eKeys is a very small 37 key controller that allows me to quickly trigger samples (loops and such). The 61es is full-sized, plays relatively well, and I highly recommend it.

As far as drum sounds, I paid a little more and got the DR-008 drum sampler and the NSkit_7 samples from naturalstudio.co.uk (it ended up about $200 total). It is truly awesome (over 18 GB of samples) and does more than even I need it for. I've got a song that I'm almost done with that I wanted to show off in this forum, and it uses those drums, so you can get a taste for what they can do.

Hope this helps,
Joe

I actually disagree with robo for once! Just in the drum choice, though. I've never been overly impressed with Sonic Implant's blue jay sounds, it just didn't have the right sound for me. The nskit (NOT the free one) is a different ballgame. I think that the free nskit is not that great. The "pay-fer" one has seven kits recorded in pro rooms with pro equipment. It also has every articulation that you could think of, and the instrument list keeps expanding (tambourines already, congas on the way). Again, this all comes down to personal preference. You may be better off learning loop slicing and use Smart Loops or DOD or something. All of the options we've offered will sound good, its just up to you to look around, listen to samples, and try to get a taste of what you want to do.

Joe

Thanks Joe and Rob! I might just try and see what midi sounds like though stock sound card - some of the M-Audios models have gotten good reviews. I'd like drums, but it would be nice to play some keyboard sounds as well. Rich.

The kit it comes with is nice, but it will import many other kits, maybe NS, so check it out. it learns as it goes

You can open a sound font player inside jamstix and import a kit like NS and play the i tried it last night and it works great.