Elastic Drums

This is one of my favorite grooveboxes, hardware or not, for the process of making variations on sounds and patterns. It’s super easy to make copies of things, so if you’re the kind of musician who’s always thinking “what if I did it that way instead?” you can really quickly build up a set of variations on a loop. Then you can instantaneously switch not just between patterns, but entire projects if you want while performing. (Also, each pattern in a project file can have a different sound set.). If only DAWs made it that easy to play live! The area I find this lacking is features that most hardware or software gives you to add variation to a sound, like LFOs or conditional triggers. You can record automation, but it’s always synced to the pattern, so it’s gonna sound like a loop. And there is a performance effects section with beat repeaters, stutters, and things like that, but it feels more intended for doing a flashy breakdown, not something that can keep on running on its own and add some life. There are some ways you can get around this, like make 2 copies of a track and set them to different lengths, but that will only get you so far, and then you’ve already used up 2 out of 6 tracks. So unfortunately it feels a little limited depending on what type of music/performance you’re into. If they added LFOs and made a desktop version I could probably get lost in this for a couple years though. It’s dead simple but the sounds are super nice and the workflow is just that great.

I have been using elastic drums from day one, and I love it still. I really enjoy the workflow and design, it’s very appropriate for the way I think about some drum sound design. I do have a problem for the past couple of years though, inter app audio is not very consistent, buggy, crashes and generally does not play nice with Cubasis (which I use about 99% of the time). It’s not a elastic drums issue, it’s an inter app audio issue. It happens with all other apps that use inter app audio. I’m at the point that I just won’t use apps that only use inter app audio. I would love to dive back into using elastic drums, but every single time I use elastic drums I have a crash before I get to render anything. This may have something to do with the fact that I really push the cpu on my mixes, but with AU3’s I generally don’t loose much data when I have a crash, and with au3’s crashes happen way less frequently. Freezing tracks with inter app audio doesn’t help, and I try simply rendering elastic drums tracks outside of using cubasis, but it makes it difficult to easily make changes to a things if I have to render, export and then import for each and every change. It’s a big hassle that kind of gets in the way of using the app/flow. Again I don’t think it has anything to do with the way the app is made. Elastic apps are rock solid. Inter app audio is not rock solid and really is making its way out. Hopefully other developers will see this and convert their apps to au3 primarily.

So, I got this app and a few of the IAP’s (next is ‘import sample’) and then didn’t use it for a while. At first, I don’t even know why but I thought it was hokey. Honestly, I had yet to figure out the velocity function (this is now huge for me, in other apps too, much like LFO) and wasn’t impressed with the layout or even the sounds. Fast forward to about a month ago and I’m digging deeper. I really was looking for more organic sounding drums but have found that the sounds this app is capable of is extremely versatile. And I’m sure once I acquire the import IAP I’ll be totally addicted. I’m really just getting started with this app even though I’ve had for quite some time. I give it 5 stars simply because there is so much more to it than meets the eye.