Electronic Drum Kits

Danny1969

The sounds in the Roland TD25 and TD30 are pretty good. I've done a lot of recording with those, recording as midi, tighting up and then triggering back. Not cheap though

You can use a cheap TD3 kit to trigger Kontakt player, that's what I used to do as the TD3's own sounds in the brain are pretty bad. I used Steven Slate samples but theres loads of good other ones 

Lodious

IMHO, the Roland sounds are poor because of the small size of the sample library and the fact Roland still think white baseball boots and frost wash jeans are fashionable. A decent sample library will be 10's of GB in size. Sampling of the deacy on the cymbals takes a lot of memory, so Roland use smaller samples and put a bit of reverb on to make them sound OK. Tastes and technology have moved on, but Roland are a long way behind the curve IMHO.

Some of the Platinum Samples libraries sound amazing...good kits, really well recorded using top flight gear and good producers. I don't think Roland will ever compete with this type of thing (not knocking them, it's just not their core business).

axisus

octatonic said:

axisus said:

I got a Roland kit some years ago. It has the mesh heads, which are pretty good, but the hi-hat isn't great and the sounds are poor. If I record I use eZDrummer on my laptop for sounds, which is way better. Why are Roland so poor on the sound side of things???

The TD30 module has some of the best sounding hihats and they respond really well.

There is quite a bit of tweaking that can be done to adjust sensitivity based on your technique.

What module did you have?

Can't even remember which module off the top of my head? It's not so much the sensitivity as the sounds. I'd swap the whole lot to just have to eZdrummer sounds built in. It may be a TD9?

Drew_TNBD

The best module in my opinion is the 2box. You can craft your own samples with their editor, and it has something like 4GB of space on the unit itself, which is plenty for a fully detailed kit - especially if you only use stereo samples and don't bother with any multichannel stuff.

I'm currently thinking about grabbing our office 2box brain, and crafting some DIY shell triggers, and adding some pads to the setup - for home use. We've got a TD-20 at the office, but I want something at home.

blobb

The Roland module is basically a drum synth. So it generates it's own sounds internally. The advantage to me was sensitivity and responsiveness. I use a td9 and the VEX packs were a marked upgrade over the internal pre-sets. With the Vex kits you are basically paying for someone to create pre-sets which sound pretty close to a reference kit, but still keeping the sensitivity intact.

Moving to midi was a revelation, I use SD2 for this and out of the box it responds nearly as well as the vex packs but with so much more realistic sounds. I now use my kit exclusively via midi, so how good the module sounds are is now irrelevant to me. I would say the smart money is spent on a more realistic controller (mesh heads, vh11 or better hi hat).

Once I have the midi notes in SD2 (via cubase in my case) The mixing power of SD comes into play and that's where it really scores over the other VST's I tried.

The 2Box of course is a sample based module which I understand (with a bit of fiddling) you can upload SD or other samples into. But I've heard the hi hat needs some tweaking?

Happy with my TD9 mesh head kit/vh11 into SD2. The VH11, plus a good bass pedal, to me tackles the playability aspect. 

One of the plus points for Roland heads is build quality, they can take a load of bashing without falling apart.

I've heard good things about pintech cymbals too.

Drew_TNBD

The Roland stuff uses samples as well. They're not drum synths.

blobb

I thought they were based on COSM modelling?

octatonic

It is sample based.

It has 'behaviour modelling' stuff but that is a layer over the top of the samples and controls how the samples are filtered and respond to playing.

They nailed it with the snare- it feels very similar to a real one.

The toms still have a little way to go imho.

Drew_TNBD

As far as I know, the COSM side of things will be strictly limited to the effects processing. But the raw drums will be samples. Similar to how EZ Drummer works, where it has a core chunk of samples that then get processed to sound like different types of drumkits.

octatonic

Drew_fx said:

As far as I know, the COSM side of things will be strictly limited to the effects processing. But the raw drums will be samples. Similar to how EZ Drummer works, where it has a core chunk of samples that then get processed to sound like different types of drumkits.

Basically yes.

An example of this is I can change the 22" bass drum to being a 24" bass drum.

It doesn't do much to the sample other than a bit of pitch shifting and a slightly bigger bass eq.

You could do this with any other sample library in Logic but you'd need to know how much to pitch shift it to get a 22" to sound approximately like a 24".

Same with the snares- making a 5" shell into a 6.5" shell has a pitch shift and eq change.

You can add/subtract the amount of snare effect you want- it is basically just a wet/dry control but renamed as 'snare amount'.

None of this is rocket science- what Roland do well here is being able to present it in 'drummer language'.

It makes the experience a bit more like using a regular kit but in effect it is a simple bunch of parameters that are changed.

Drew_TNBD

Yeah drummer language definitely a plus. Although pitching shifting drum samples sucks, imho.

I guess I was trying to clarify that the brains aren't doing any physical modelling synthesis. It's just recordings of drum pieces being played back based on your velocity input.

blobb

Doesn't that make it a sample based synth? (only joking) Thanks for the info chaps.