Alesis SR-18 - Studio-Grade Standalone Drum Machine With On-Board Sound Library, Performance Driven I/O And In-Built Effects/Processors

Finally!!!!! The drum machine I've been looking for!!! If you want access to a plethora of great drum sounds, and the ability to program either simple or complex drum patterns and stitch them together to make great songs then this is the machine for you. Looking forward to using this in a live situation. What a relief!!!!!!

This drum machine was recommended to me by a musician friend. It was a top tip! It’s a fantastic piece of kit. I’m no techie, but I found this fairly intuitive to use. So good to be able to create my own percussion patterns and change them with a foot pedal (needs to be bought separately, but only £12). Drum sounds are very authentic too. Recommended.

Why do you think these are still in production for more than 30years.? Absolute workhorse. Admittedly out of the box they have a distinctly 80s shoulder pad vibes, wide stereo bass drums anyone? But with a little coaxing and a saturator pedal and/or compressor these little babies can tear up the room. I call mine Tina :) I sold my all singing dancing Roland TR-6S as it just had 2010s demo energy, menu diving for days and ton of noise. Never looked back, me and Tina are beyond the thunderdome. Yeah!

SR16 or SR18, Trying to decide? I’m a guitarist, but I wanted a drum machine, I don’t know why, but I did. I’ve a Beatbuddy Mini 2 which gets mixed reviews, but which I find exceedingly fun pedal to play along to at home, but I wanted something with midi and more programable. I bought both the SR16 and SR18 to compare. Here are my first impressions for anyone trying to decide between the two, I hope it helps. They both have impressive (yet retro) drum sounds, very usable and recordable with a little tweaking. They both have a learning curve, luckily, Alesis have good manuals included in the box. Side by side, the differences are notable. Sizewise, the SR16 is smaller, but not by much, the SR18 seems more ‘professional’ in build quality, though both of these units have a reputation for being very reliable. The keys are bigger, more tactile (and have a nice ‘zx spectrum’ rubber vibe!) I found the SR16 to be a little hit-and-miss when tying to 'tap' at the relative pressures, both are velocity sensitive, but the SR18s are a lot easier to use for input. Also, the spin wheel is better and the layout is less cramped, that little extra real estate is put to good use. It’s not perfect, but the revisions make it easier and more rewarding to use. The unlit display on the SR16 is a huge oversight and should have been corrected even if it meant adding another to the price. I can’t imagine using it on a dim stage... at all. The SR18’s display is limited by modern standards, but is large, well lit and easy to read at a glance. Drum sounds are personal taste, both machines included some good kits. The SR18 adds ‘play along bass’ which can be turned off. For some reason, only the SR18 can run truly portable (6x AA batteries) which seems another cost-cut too far for the SR16. A design choice as strange as omitting a backlight for something so portable. I would have loved to see the keys backlit on both models or at least the more essential ones ‘bordered’ with a glow to aid navigation, it seems a standard these days on other equipment, even at this price point. Your mileage may vary of course, but as soon as I took the SR18 out of the box, I knew the little brother SR16 was going back to meet its maker. It's not a bad machine - at all! But you can see where the extra money went, the SR18 is more suitable if you want to break out of the bedroom and perform live, and I'm sure many solo and duo acts are using it, as you are reading this overview. Which must be a recommendation, of sorts . SR16 / Three Stars SR18 / Four Stars

just wonderful

Great drum sounds - can build your own kit from various samples - can write in real time from patterns - can programme patterns to songs- can use step mode to fine tune song patterns - really versitile and so well thought out function wise - can use it live or for home recording - has been used in professional recordings- best drum machine I have ever owned

I would have give 4.5 Stars, but to be honest, I got what I expected for a second-hand Unit. My Alesis HR16 having gone into retirement and vendors asking silly money for second-hand ones, I thought I'd look at the SR16s as all I really want is what the HR16 had already given me. I don't need the bells and whistles of the SR18, so the SR16 was the obvious choice. It arrived in good time. I live in the Scottish Northern Isles so tend to take delivery dates with a pinch of salt, but this actually arrived a day early. Impressed! The SR16 needed a good clean as it was a bit marked and dusty, but came up fine. I also contact sprayed Sockets as is my usual Practice with new gear. Running the Presets, and the sounds are there as I wished. In the box was a small plastic Wallet, presumably for the Users Manual, but it was empty. Now whether there was supposed to be document in there or what, I don't know. It's easy to find them on the Web though, so no real problem. The Pads seem to require a bit more pressure than my HR16 did. This can make programming fills and little trippy kinda stuff a bit hit and miss. I don't know if it's to do with the age of this particular Unit or not. Not a great problem for me as I tend to program from Roland Pads. But it maybe something to consider if you are using this as a stand alone Drum Machine. There are just three levels of programmable Sensitivity - Low is next to useless, Medium is the main one, and High basically give little in the way of dynamics. Another thing to bear in mind is something that the SR16 has been quite rightly criticised for, there is no Contrast Control for the LCD Screen, and neither is it backlit. If this is a deal breaker for you, then go for the SR18. It is a bit of a problem for me, but not major. Taking all of the above into account, I'm very happy with my SR16 and it limitations. The Drum sounds are 'quality'. If one is careful with the programming, then with this machine it would be relatively easy to fool Joe Public that a real drummer and kit is is being played - if that's what you want. It is also very easy to make it sound like a retro Drum Machine too, which after all this is! If you like the SR16 Sounds, like the classic Drum Machine method of working and are happy with it's MIDI flexibility, then this is the machine for you. If your focusing on more Dance orientated stuff, then this will do it, but its no 808. I like it!

ALESIS - SR16 CLASSIC 24BIT DIGITAL DRUM MACHINE rocks where it should....In the studio, in the home songwriting workstation or anywhere you build your craft. This was a Amazon.ca purchase in March 2017 that I made after using some software styled units that lagged behind and a early 2000's version of a Boss-Dr Rhythm that wasn't very user friendly! So then the ALESIS SR16 entered my mind. IMO, this unit rises to its top level when tasked with building song structures in the Rock, Hard Rock/Metal genres. With the ALESIS-SR16 DRUM MACHINE getting a 2012 new 16 to 24 Bit Firmware upgrade and slight renaming to become: ALESIS - SR16 CLASSIC 24~BIT STEREO DIGITAL DRUM MACHINE. I had the old version back in the late '90's and I can say the 24Bit version crushes the original. 1st off, is the superior "stereo" sound quality, it's crystal clear. 2nd the original had some bombastic drum sounds that were awash in late 80's studio reverb of the worst kind. The 24-bit doesn't have that annoying tone anywhere in the unit. 3rd, is the much improved feel and pressure sensitivity of the programming pads, when your crafting beats for songwriting, it's very important that the unit is reactive to the sound textures your exploring. Hit the pads hard or soft, the unit stays the course with you, unlike some USB/Software based models that sometimes are challenged to keep up. It says a lot about this Alesis series, when with the release of the SR18 Drum Machine, the many competition models, the ALESIS - SR16 CLASSIC 24~BIT STEREO DIGITAL DRUM MACHINE is still the best selling unit of all time.

Very useful for composing song. I got it for special price at Amazon .

Cette drum machine est très bien! Les sons sont très bons. Il y a pas mal de bon rythmes. La programmation est différente des drums machines actuelles, mais elle fait son travail. Pour moi, c'est un bon achat.

Fair price, good quality. Thank you

The Alesis SR18 Drum Machine is amazing. I have had many problems with every computer based drum machine program. It's not that they didn't work right, but the fact that they just weren't for me. I am very good with computers, do photography editing, and music editing, etc, all on the few computers I own. As far as doing drums on my computer, It just wasn't clicking. Everyone has to find their path of least resistance, and THEIR best method for doing things, since everybody is different and everyone has their own path of least resistance. Hence, to each, their own. What works best and is the easiest for one person, may be the most complicated for the other. What is most complicated for you, may be the easiest for the other person. Basically what I am saying is this drum machine, once in my hands, really clicked. This was MY path of least resistance. It's good to know I can sit down with this machine, and only this machine, and make full drum tracks. As far as some people saying this is so hard to use, or takes a couple months, for me it took two days. Hence, 6 one way, half dozen the other. The first day I just messed with it, without directions. It was confusing. The second day, I read the directions, and by the end of the second day, I had already made three full length drum tracks, doing everything from customizing my entire drum set and sounds, making a bunch of patterns, and then piecing all those patterns together to make tracks. Ok, so now for what it can do: * I saw one review where they said you cannot change the length of the patterns. This is not true. You CAN indeed change the length of the patterns. You can use whatever tempo you want, 120, 140, whatever, and you can make the patterns 4 beats long, or 8, or 16, etc. * You can customize your own drum setup, so you have have a couple bass, etc. Rule of thumb if you are trying to re-create double bass, is to make two sounds, almost identical, BUT make the second sound a little different tonewise. Because in real life, you can tell the difference between both bass drums. This makes it sound more realistic. * There are a TON of different sound variations for every kind of drum sound you want. * You can tweak each individual sound. For instance, if I find a crash I like, but think to myself that I want it to sound softer, offset it to the right a little, change the pitch to a slightly lower pitch, and also make it ring on longer, ALL of this is possible. * Learning this machine really is not that hard. Can be done within a good weekend. All in all, this machine is amazing. I am a heavy metal guitarist, and I record my own tracks on a Tascam DP-02, and this works great in conjunction with that. This machine works very well with the metal genre, or rock, or any genre at all. It lets me put together full length tracks (from all of my combined patterns I made), does very very well using it in a double bass aspect (you can program the bass to sound like double bass, and as fast as you want), and you end up with very realistic sounding drum tracks! Since I play metal, this is VERY important, since it's hard to find a good drum machine that can go with the metal genre. Last, all I have to do is plug it into my Tascam recorder, and record! Love it! This sounds amazing! The one and ONLY downside to this is the fact that there is NO connection to connect it to your computer. I want to make this clear. There is a way to hook up through your instrument cable connections, but then I'm not sure how this hooks to your computer through a 1/4" cable connection. But all I have to do is record them into my Tascam, then send them to my computer, where I can save them for later. Hope this helps, and sorry about rambling. Any questions, feel free to comment and I will surely answer them for you the best I can, to help out.