I learned to use a drum machine on the SR16 and years later finally deciding to get my own drum machine, I went to the SR18. I am glad to say I did not regret that choice, because this drum machine is an amazing piece of equipment for all styles of music! And not only is it an amazing piece of equipment, but the sounds and samples are drastically improved from the SR16.

I purchased the SR18 because I wanted to start creating my own professional electronic music (mainly house, trance, and dance beats). For a while, I was using FL Studio to produce my drums but over the years, I've grown tired of the generic drum beats. The drum samples were of somewhat low quality and I had to equalize and program all the effects for each drum piece every song. It would take me hours. In addition to this, I got tired of the old drum roll and piano roll for programming my drum notes. I finally decided to get a drum machine and I more than happy I did. The SR18 solved all my problems. First off, high quality samples. Every drum sound on this machine sounds extremely realistic. I played the demos off this thing and the drum kicks would shake the floor! Second, the effects on this thing are awesome. Preset reverb, equalization, and ambiance on all the kits and samples with this thing. No more spending hours making crappy drum samples sound good. Lastly, velocity sensitive pads make this thing a steal for the price compared to the other drum machines out there.

One improvement on this thing over the SR16 is it now does more than just drums. It has extra slots for percussion and bass. What does this mean? The 12 pads on this machine hide the true number of drum pieces you can have on your drum set. You can have 24 piece drum sets by including the 12 on the percussion page. This is good for metal music for example as you can recreate multi piece drum sets with extra toms and cymbals. The bass page plays back bass samples and the pads act as a drum controller. Some of the bass samples sound kind of cheesy but the industrial and electronic bass presets sound awesome. Also, this thing has more than just bass samples. It has some awesome sounding synth presets to throw into your songs!

I am now off to making great sound beats quickly and effortlessly for my music. Besides the great sounds, this thing only took a couple of days to get set up with my system. I have it integrated into my entire workstation so it can send and receive MIDI data through a USB MIDI hub. I also have the audio going into my mixer board so it sounds good. If you want, you can use this device for more than drums; it can be used as a MIDI controller if you wish to use it for those purposes. I have no complaints about this device. The one person on here complaining about this device not saving their songs does not know how to use the drum machine. It is fully capable of saving all drum patterns and songs you create on it.

The last thing I will say about this device is the price is excellent. It's expensive but I've seen drum machines for electronic music that cost thousands of dollars. In addition to this, VST (software) plugins for the computers usually cost just as much, and you are not even getting a physical piece of hardware to play with! No matter your style of music, this thing excels at it all with excellent samples for hip hop, trance, metal, rock, and even funk. I recommend this to intermediate to professional level users. Beginners should learn to program drum samples first on the PC and learn what MIDI is before trying to use this drum machine.

We use the Alesis SR 18 in our rock band (3 members, no drummer). It goes through the mixer and then in the PA (Fender). Sounds are very good and the stereo effect adds reality. I control the sr18, while I play guitar, with two foot switches (one to start it and one to use the fills and change between A and B patterns and assign tempo). The fills help to make it sound very realistic. We use it in practice and live (small venues). I never owned a drum machine before. I found this one easy to use thanks to the user guide that goes through the different functions in details (It took me about 5-6 hours of "study" before starting being able to program the sr 18). I mainly use preset or user patterns and fills that I copy in an empty pattern spot and then reprogram (change sounds, effects, tempo, add, delete stuff). Don't forget to save. If you turn it off, there will be no warning and everything will be lost. I also sometimes create my own patterns but then I have trouble creating the fills (I am not a drummer). I then arrange those patterns in songs but I also use patterns directly when playing and I control them with the foot switches. I contacted their help center (via email) to learn more about saving my work in an external harddrive- to save the machine memory- and the answer came one day later very uiseful)The best feature for us, when we play the sr18 in song mode, is to be able, with the foot swich, to play as long as we want (so we can repeat a chorus or play a longer guitar solo). Very versatile machine when controlled with two foot switches!

I just got the Alesis SR18 and figured out how to work pretty much everything on it. Wonderful. I just recorded my first pattern that I would like to save so that I can store my own songs and use this live. I start jammin with it. Turn the thing off. The next time I turn it on it's not there! Tried it again. Loose everything I just made when I turn it off! I know how to use the record feature and save, but it's just not working. Maybe mine was defective.

I owned the sr-16 and then ordered the sr-18. ,I found that the sr-18 does sound much, much better. It has all the features of the sr-16 but with better sounds, a percussion layer and a bass layer. Also, it has a ton of different drum kits and even bass emulations. That being said, the bass sounds are kind of a toy and thank goodness it has a mute button to remove the bass from the presets. The a/b/fill patterns controllable with footswitch are done correctly. Overall, a really solid well thought out drum machine that sounds really good. 3 cons are: you can't load your own midi patterns, you cant load your own samples and no pc connectivity at all. Other than that, this has tap tempo, a really nice bright backlit lcd screen, midi. It is a blast to play along with and great for recording/live use and it is really simple.I recommend it for a solid drum machine with pretty realistic sounds. The added effects make it sound really good as well.

I do a single. The promise of having drums AND bass was what attracted me to the SR-18. The machine does everything it promises but I have a few complaints. First of all, capacity. Songs are made by making patterns and them stringing them together. If the machine only holds 100 patterns and it takes 4 or 5 to make a song, then the actual song capacity is only 20-25 NOT 100. Secondly, this is NOT a user friendly machine. The manual takes you through every detail of every feature from square one. Simpler instructions could be written to get started and the tweaking could be expanded on later. Thirdly, some of the preset beats are pretty lame. It would be nice to have a bit more variety, especially with the latin beats. You can create them yourself but again, your're using up capacity. If you can live with those limitations, then I highly recommend this machine. If not, find something simpler!