LETS FACE IT, there's nothing better than a little bit of judicious cheating. Learning to make the most of your drum machine is little more than a process of discovering a series of nifty short cuts and tricks to achieve a certain end.

It's worth noting at this point that different styles of programming require different 'cheating techniques'. For example, when programming straight-up rock and pop, dynamics and sounds tend to require the most attention. For hiphop and funk on the other hand, memory saving techniques and tricks with tempo and quantisation are likely to be needed more. And towards that end, here are a few miscellaneous tips that might come in handy...

First of all: saving memory. The cardinal rule here is to delete everything you don't need. On the face of it, that sounds obvious: if you run out of pattern memory, delete patterns you're not using. But that's just step one. Step two involves going over everything you've programmed and checking there's no data contained within a program that's not needed.

For example, out of habit, you might have programmed accents where they're not needed. Take them out. Or perhaps you've experimented with a cowbell part in a pattern to complement the shaker line. Having found you don't need it, you've turned the volume of the cowbell to zero, but left the part programmed, in case you want it back when you return to program the song as a whole. Now you definitely don't want it, delete it. It'll free up more memory for use elsewhere.

If you have it, look back at Beat Box published in the April 89 issue of Phaze 1. In that article, we discussed the use of the 'swing' function. If possible when you're programming shuffle beats, use this feature — it saves large amounts of memory.

Another means of saving memory is shown in Diagram K. Take a look at Patterns 1 to 4. You'll see that they are all simple patterns, quantised to 16, containing drum fills in the second half of the bar.

Now look at Patterns 5 to 9. These are all 'half bars' (2/4 as opposed to 4/4) with 8 steps each. Pattern 1 may be replaced by the pair 5 and 6, 2 by 5 and 7, 3 by 5 and 8, 4 by 5 and 9. In this way, five 2/4 patterns replace four 4/4 patterns: saving memory overall. Of course, if you take this too far, you lose out when you chain patterns together into songs — the more patterns, the greater the number of steps in a song.

Also remember that if your patterns are simple, you are likely to run out of pattern locations before pattern memory. Look at it this way. Say you have 99 user programmable patterns available. If your patterns are complicated, you may run out of memory even when only 60 locations have been used. On the other hand, if your patterns are simple, you may fill up all 99 locations before you run out of memory. So you have to tread a fine line between lots of short, simple patterns (using many locations), and longer, more complex patterns (using more overall memory). I s'pose that's as clear as mud; but you'll soon realise what I mean the first time you run out of memory at that crucial moment...

A similar trick with quantisation can be useful in getting around another common problem. Say you want to program a piece with a complex, fast drum fill. Your machine only quantises as far as 16 or 24 (say), and so you're stumped.

Not necessarily. For example, say you want to program a fill that would normally need quantisation to 48. Try this for size: string together two patterns of 24 and double the tempo. In that way, you can effectively double the quantisation ability of the machine. Unfortunately, you can generally only double the tempo to 250bpm or less, so tracks faster than 125bpm cannot be programmed in this way. In addition, this method of increasing quantisation uses a great deal of memory and so can only be used sparingly.

Play around with these last two ideas: splitting patterns and doubling the tempo. They've helped me out of trouble many times when using less powerful beatboxes.

Next time, we'll throw in a few more ideas, including doubling up sounds to create new ones. Until then, keep programming and don't touch any baby food.