Alesis SR-16 - Studio-Grade Standalone Drum Machine With On-Board Sound Library, Performance Driven I/O and In-Built Effects

I am teaching myself to play bass and wanted something more interesting to practice with than my metronome. I am also following Ed Friedland's Bass Groove book, which recommends using a drum machine.I vacillated between this and a software/computer/drum pad/dac setup. I'm really glad I chose this. It is a great one-box set up for practice and it has a ton of flexibility that makes it useful (and fun) in a variety ways I hadn't thought of initially. For practice, I plug the bass into the instrument input, my headphones into the output and away I go. I keep it powered up with rechargeable AA's that keep me going for several multi-hour sessions before I need to swap them out. Very portable, very compact.The drum sounds, as others have commented, are great - clear, crisp, realistic, and stereo! Over the headphones, it is great. The deeper bass and kick drum parts kick serious butt when amplified. The library has a nice balance of sounds that covers a large enough spectrum to keep me busy for a while. Programming is not hard if you actually read the manual and play with it a bit. For my purposes at this point, it has way more capability than I need.Bonus:- The multiple outputs are really cool. You can, for example, map the bass or percussion track to go out through the auxiliary channel, you can then run that part through a bass-synth or reverb pedal for example, and just have fun twiddling the dials. Very fun and sounds cool - and can make the bass samples come alive.- Although the bass sounds are pretty lame as many have pointed out, they give you something of a bass line sketch to work from. At my beginner level I find it is actually great to be able to slow the machine down to hear the note selection and timing of the bass parts. No, it's not Tony Levin, but for learning I am finding it gives me a great starting point. I can run it for awhile trying to follow it with the bass line turned on, then I can mute the bass part to see if I can keep up without the "teacher" or come up with variations that fit. Nice tool. Since you can make it almost arbitrarily slow, it really helps for being able to pick up the patterns.- Instrument input/headphone out. Nice touch. Volume knob works just on the drum going to headphones, you control instrument outboard so the volume is a really like a mix control.- Battery operation is great, and using rechargeables really sets you free.- The build is nice and solid. I've paid way more for way less.Features one could want this decade:- It's weird for a device sold in 2015 to not have USB or SD card support. No doubt that would raise the cost, but the midi Sysex dump process outlined in the manual for backing up user patterns and songs seems antediluvian. Heck, maybe they should have put an rs-232 serial console on it too while they were at it (smirk).- The ability to import sounds to extend the ROM package would be a nice feature in this day and age where a few gigs of flash ram costs a few dollars.To sum up, this is a great self-contained drum machine that gives you a lot of power, flexibility, and good sound for a not-ridiculous price. The world seems to have mostly moved on to software, and if you have already made the investments in time educating yourself and getting all the pieces to work together plus the money to get all those pieces (Midi pads, DAW, computer, DAC in/out), then the SR18 is probably redundant. But, if you just want to make some beats that sound really nice, keep them in your bag, and not get all complicated, then this thing is great.

A couple of years ago, I tried sequencing some of my hardware synths using my Novation Circuit. I used two of the four MIDI channels for synth sequencing, and the other two to sequence the Circuit's internal drums. Fast forward to late last year, I got a Novation Launchpad MK3 to use as a sequencer. Since the Launchpad has no internal sounds, I needed a drum machine.I bought an IK Multimedia UNO Drum, which worked fine for a couple of months and suddenly started frying power supplies (batteries and USB wall chargers). I got this SR-16 to replace the UNO Drum.I've had it for a few weeks and am happy with it thus far. The SR-16 comes with it's own power supply, which I am grateful for. The portability of batteries is nice but for equipment like this, I feel constant power from a "wall wart" is much more reliable. The unit itself is a good size; it, along with the Launchpad and hardware synths are piled up on a computer desk in a "DAWless" setup, so space is at a premium. The SR-16 is small enough to very comfortably fit on the desk, yet the onboard controls don't feel excessively small or difficult to access.In this setup, the Launchpad is my master MIDI clock in addition to sending note data, so my SR-16 is just playing drum hits as a slave unit. So, I can't comment about this unit's internal sequencer or other features regarding it's sequencer since I'm not utilizing them. I may do just that later on, if I ever get around to dusting my guitars off and getting back into playing guitar.As for drum sounds, I'm pleasantly surprised. I figured the SR-16 would just have a bunch of copies of the same drum hits with subtle changes (i.e. "Snare 01, Snare 02, Tom 01, Tom 02", etc.). To an extent, that statement is true. But the SR-16 shows it's age here by coming with a couple of cheat sheets. One sheet is a table of all the drum hits, specifically their names. The names of the hits also give a very brief description of what the hit will sound like. Reading the names alone, you'll see that there's a good variety of drum tones to be had in this unit, from more natural hits, to heavily edited hits, to full on electronic hits. Some of the hit names describe effects assigned to them, whereas some describe the intended genre of music the hit was designed for.This leads into my favorite feature of the SR-16: Creating custom drum kits.You can save your custom setups as well, which is very handy and helpful for me, since I'm very spontaneous about my DAWless jamming. I prefer to turn the equipment on and just start punching in note data on the Launchpad to hear what happens to the synths I send the data to. Being able to have a drum set that I know well since I'm the one that compiled it eliminates unwanted setup time, and eliminates guesswork about the set. I do see that you can create your own sequences but again, I'm not utilizing this feature in my current setup.All in all, I'm again quite happy with the SR-16. While I'm only using a fraction of it's potential, I'm happy it's such a flexible and feature packed unit; I have room to grow with this unit, but even if I always just sequence it off my Launchpad, it does so very well.

This is pretty much an old school drum machine but eith modern capabilities. There's a steep learning curve if you're new to these or have used older ones such as Yamaha Dx7. It's incredibly customizable but can be very time consuming getting what you want.