Alesis SR-16 is my drum machine by the way and I always have a battle with it. That just doesn't happen with my guitars or bass, or anything else - . I guess it's because it's a computerised machine – I'm not good with this sort of things. I like it though. It has the most faithful sounds to a live performance of a drum kit, that's what I always have in mind when I write drum patterns.

I was adding drum patterns to a new song recently and my battle inevitably began again. I was only doing a simple drum roll but it corrected itself to a much slower one. I took off the quantize function and started recording it live so that it wouldn't correct it in a funny way. I hit a wrong beat, tried to erase it but it wouldn't. I could erase all the other beats but the wrong one. It made no difference how hard or long I pressed 'Erase' button. So I deleted the pattern, started afresh and exactly the same thing happened. The same mistake that couldn't be erased no matter what!

So in the end I decided to ignore the mistake and added a correct beat on top it and – oh how interesting did it sound? It sounded like a unique drum roll like you've never heard before…. If I'm going to record this song properly, I'll have to make sure an engineer won't 'fix it' with Beat Master!

So I don't know why – it just does this sort of things all the time and makes my life unexpectedly exciting really. Funny enough it always behaves perfectly in a studio. Amazing. Even when I had to quickly change the set up of 25 patterns, it just did it. May be it knows exactly what it's doing – it knows I have no time to mess about in the studio when I'm paying lots of money for it. May be it just likes to tease me at home? SR-16 you are a handful – I still need you though.