The HammerHead Rhythm Station 1.0 is easy to use for creating House, Hip Hop, Techno, Triphop, Rap and Industrial beats, to name a few. Even complete beginners find the interface intuitive and clean. Rhythm Station’s design is similar to Roland’s TR-909 drum computer program and comes with the Roland 808 and 909 libraries pre-installed. Features include 16 beat tracks, basic tempo control, distortion, shuffle and feedback adjustments, basic loops, 6 channels, 6 break-beats, 23 drum patches, 29 built-in drums, tutorial, and 6 slots for importing your own samples. When saved, the beats are high-quality WAV files that you can export to trackers, sequencers or samplers.
Drumstation is a drum software synthesizer. The intent of this design was to fill in for the drummer, during songwriting or rehearsal, but it has become a valued source of older samples and functions well as a stand-alone beat synthesizer. Also based on the Roland drum synthesizer, the Drumstation contains samples from the TR 909, TR 606 and the TR 808 versions, among others. Features include 8 channels of drums (a mixture of samples and synthesized drum sounds), the ability to import and sample your custom loops, a selection of effects like distortion, delay, and reverb, independent filters for drums and loops and playback on iPhone, iPod speakers or P.C. Each saved file is a high-quality WAV file.
FL Studio 9.1 is a complete music-editing suite, and as of 2010, offers a free trial download. Since it’s the present day version of the famous Fruity Loops program from Image Line Software, it is well worth a try for experienced beat makers. Beginners find that the FL Studio has a steep learning curve until its interface becomes familiar. Features include beat chopping with the “Fruityslicer,” the ability to hook up to almost any studio gear using VSTi and DXi plug-ins and a wide range of drums, instruments and sound effect samples to choose from. FL Studios requires a Windows 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7 operating system.