Video: Should I Go With the Trigger Finger?

Alright, all you production heads who have been telling me that I need to take the plunge already. After doing some extensive research, I think I'm going to go with the Trigger Finger as my starter piece of production equipment. I know that the MPD 24 is probably a better piece of equipment. However, I'm leaning toward the Trigger Finger because it comes bundled with Ableton Live Lite. Unless, any of you can explain to me whether Cool Edit would work with any of these controllers, I don't want to fork out the cash for some production software if it can be avoided. Keep in mind that I'm stuck in the 94 state of mind, I'm just trying to flip some loops. Nothing too crazy, I doubt I'd even get into original drum programing. Any advice and information would be greatly appreciated.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

yea that would b fine 4 wat ur doing

pipomixes said...

Cool.

Sleepyhead said...

If you're just getting started, definitely go with the Trigger Finger.

On top of the pads you get a set of dials & faders, which you'll be relieved to have as you gain experience.

Hope that helps, peace.

m71 said...

I love my Trigger Finger and Ableton makes music creation easy and quick

Marcus Wudz said...

yeah you might wanna try ableton live in combination with izotopes phatmatik pro plugin, which lets you load in wav samples and add trigger points like an mpc, so you can get all premier-y :p cool edit sucks with midi so i wouldnt recommend that.

pipomixes said...

Marcus,

If the phatmatik pro pluggin is needed to add trigger points, what does ableton do?

Sorry if the question sounds elementary.

Sleepyhead said...

Pipo,

Phatmatik Pro allows your sample and slice it into separate pieces. Then you'd typically assign each slice to a pad on your Trigger Finger a la MPC and flip the sample any way you like.

Ableton Live Lite doesn't offer that feature. The newest versions (7 and now 8) have a new module, Drum Racks, that allows you to do just this. But you'll have to upgrade to a better version of Ableton and also pay for that extra module, which really adds up.

However, the Live 7 & 8 now support the REX2 format, which is used by Propellerhead's Recycle. It's a great program that lets you slice up audio like I mentioned before, and it's widely supported in most music-making software programs (Ableton, Reason, Pro Tools, Logic, etc). But having the Drum Racks module makes working with Recycle (or any other audio-slicing application like Phatmatik) a lot easier.

Anyway, it's not like you can't flip samples with just Ableton Live Lite. It'll take a little more sweat but it's nothing you can't pick up -- the Trigger Finger is still a great place to start with if you wanna get into making beats.

I could on about this stuff for hours, so get at me if you're wondering about anything else.


Sleepyhead

pipomixes said...

Thanks for the infor sleepyhead.

I think I get it, but I won't officially "get it" until I take the plunge and find out through experience.

First of the month means new paycheck and new toys!

I'll get at you if I have further questions.

Thanks to everybody for the all the helpful info