This demo of Archibald gives you a limited 30 minute time trial of this feature-rich drum program.
Archibald works like a sequencer, so if you're familiar with those you'll feel at home with this. The emphasis with Archibald is very much on creating realistic drumming, so there's not many drum tracks for techno. It features an interesting "Humanize" tool, which drums your patterns with a bit of "human" inaccuracy. If you have a band and your drummer is unreliable, this might be a good alternative (and probably cheaper than a real drummer too!).
Setting up a basic drum pattern with Archibald is pretty easy, and then you can choose from a bank of drum sounds to get the feel you want. Registered versions have access to a much larger library of sounds and can import them too, but in this demo the choices are fairly limited. To speed up your beat making, Archibald offers a creator, which will build a pattern for you based on a certain style of drumming. You can edit these to make them your own or change parts you don't like.
Archibald is quite a professional package, and not for the casual user. The demo gives you a taste of what's possible, but doesn't let you really explore and play around enough. However, if you like what you see it's not a very expensive package considering how flexible it is.
Archibald is a great drum sequencer, though it isn't very accessible for the novice and it's a shame the demo is so limited.
