Hi!

Okay let me help you here...


"1. professional sounding house drum beats. Whenever I go to the pro audio shop, seems like I can never get those synths to make any drum beat what-so-ever. Are there any that produce a high quality one?"

I suggest that you get yourself a sampler. If you choose an AKAI S5000, beef it with 128MB of RAM, the O.S. 2.0, and the USb extension (VERY important, changes everything). Then, buy a few SAMPLE CDs. quality ones, with tons of beats. most of the artists are sampling and modifying the samples in order to get what they want. Build a library this way, with both cds, and your own kits. Synthesizers are not all sample based, and it is hard to get away from the analog-electro-kraftwerk type of drums if you cant use sample based drums.


"2. less trancy toons, more disco related. Maybe what I really need is a sampler, but again, the synths i try out are always trancey wish-wash'es"

Well here again... the artists do have old and new synths (TB303, SH101, Waldorf, Access, etc..) and are sampling them, then they move the sound around the place in their wave editor, and create patches for their samplers.

I talk a lot about sampling here, but i dont use much samplers myself. However for what you are looking for, this is what you want to explore. Daft Punk were in concert in my town in France, and my friends told me that they only had a PC controlling a HUGE amount of samplers. Then they had synths and stuff to play "live" on the top. but most of the stuff was triggering samplers.

good luck man, hope this helps


"Im looking to produce music along the lines of daft punk, bob sinclar, basement jaxx, etc."