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33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Is there any good reason not to have this book?, 17 Dec 2000
It seems obvious to me that somebody should compile this book. All credit to Rene-Pierre Bardet for doing so.Back when I bought my first drum machine, the next thing I needed, after reading the manual, was some patterns to program into it. It's not easy for a novice to just listen to other peoples music and figure out how the percussion works and this book gives you a library of patterns ready to go. But, with 15 years of experience under my belt how come I still bought this book? Well, for the same reason that I have a book of guitar chords: most of the time I use the same old chords/drum patterns that I'm familiar with but other times I want something new and what could be easier than having a library of them that you can just dip into? The title worried me a little before I bought it: 200 is such a nice round number don't you think? In fact the 200 'patterns' might more accurately be called 200 'bars' or 'measures' and they are split into groups of 3 where each group contains a measure A, B, and a break pattern. The idea is that you use the A and B patterns in various combinations interspersed with breaks. These groups of 3 are arranged as 5 Rock, 15 Funk, 5 Rhythm and Blues, 5 Ballad, 5 Pop, 5 Reggae, 5 Disco, 5 Afro-Cuban, 2 Blues, 3 Swing, 2 Shuffle, 3 Samba, 2 Bossa Nova, 1 Cha-Cha, 2 Twist, and 1 Ska. You could argue that comes to 66 patterns but bear in mind that each has 3 measures and you see that 3 x 66 = 198 (the remaining 2 patterns are a couple of measures to be using as 'endings'). However, as stated earlier the idea is that you can use the groups of 3 in various combinations so with each group of 3 you can just use measure A on it's own repeated over and over. You could do the same with measure B. Then you could have measure A followed by B repeating in a 2 bar combination. Then how about AAAB or any other combination? Add the break pattern into the equation and you see that each group of 3 can be combined in numerous ways with the result that there are a lot more than 200 patterns in this book. One other thing that occurred to me was that maybe a disk with the patterns on it as midi files using the GM drum format might have been helpful to some but then I guess there are just as many people to whom it would have been useless and would have just increased the price of the book. As it stands I'm inclined to think that there isn't any good reason why anyone with a drum machine, or anything else you can program rhythms in to, should not have this book in their library.
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by Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation
by Francis Preve
by Roger Brown
by Rick Snoman
by Jon Margulies
