This earlier suggestion strikes me as predictable, but not really all that practical. Rather than having to specify an exact value for each hit between 1 and 127--a lot of extra trouble that does little to produce a more lifelike percussion track--I would urge you all to consider the virtues of doing more with less. Have a look, for example, at the interesting French drumming program called Archibald, which substitutes PROBABILITY for MIDI's anally overdetermined numeric precision, and makes it easy to specify graphically a RANGE of possible velocities--also, a range of possible "locations" for each hit, and a range of likelihoods that the hit will actually occur! That already sounds a heck of a lot more like what most live drummers I've known actually do, especially in repeating or looping patterns, rather than insisting "this particular hit must always be exactly at velocity 73!" Indeed, I'd recommend everyone download the free demo of this program and play with it a little, before we faithful DB users try to push poor Ben any further into Just-Another-MIDI- Sequencer Land. -Sterling Beckwith