wivariders's Reviews

Best Drum Kit in the World!

Have been using the drum kit since it first went on the market when I was a kid. Have been playing for over 20 years, and has been rock solid with each new release. Roland is one of the best instrument manufacturers in the world, and recording with it is super easy. Not exactly cheap, but I would pay twice as much for these beauties. Never having to mic drums is my favorite part. Helps add that live-aspect to our songs within minutes. Can't wait to take them on the road.

Best low-end digital mixer.

We use this with Ableton Live, and at first it was a bit rocky, and not very intuitive to set up. But now its a steam engine. Didn't like internet streaming audio at first, but have had no problems with Yosemite. Has been great to record our V-Drums.

Best Instrument of All-Time. Period.

Life changing instrument, cannot live without it. Nothing more can be said, check ableton.com for plenty of videos and info. Our songs got 1,000x better when we were one of the first in the world to pre-order this from Ableton headquarters. Have had it since 2013 and it has been a champion workhorse for us in the studio and live.

Ableton Live is the only DAW worth using in our opinion.

You literally can do everything and more in Ableton Live. Now that version 9 gives 64 bit capability, it is unstoppable.

The main reason it is so versatile is its ability to create in a studio environment, or perform in a live situation, like a conductor of a giant orchestra of your own sounds.

The two most useful features are Racks and Warping. It can make parallel or serial processing a breeze, and the user interface is super easy to navigate.

To get the most out of Live, the illMethodology.com workshops from iLL.Gates are a must see. His use of Drum racks, samplers and 128s gives you infinite capability with lightning-fast workflow.

Version: Ableton Live 9

Great machine, but back up your HD at all costs!

Great machine, excellent processing ability. Make sure to back up on at least three different mediums though, our hard drive had a melt down and needed to be replaced. Definitely utilize Backblaze (or cloud backup), external hard drives, dropbox and time machine. It cost $2k to recover all of our data. Apple made us pay $500 non-refundable to have the HD back to recover it from a third-party. If you need to recover, we definitely can recommend Secure Data Recovery.

Make sure to use an external HD for all of your samples, and run the software on the machine. Even though we were already doing this, it still crashed on us. Mac Pro will be the next computer for us, and hopefully better luck. We actually have two iMacs - one from 2013, and one from 2014. We use the new one for video work, and it has a Fusion Drive, which seems to correct the HD from having the archaic meltdown in the first place. Definitely spend the extra money for the Fusion Drive. Aloha!