Roland Electronic Drum Question

Ian Canefire wrote:One of my pads on my relatively new Behringer XD80 drum kit, the snare, has broken.

Unfortunately you get what you pay for mate.

I was pricing up some electronic drums a while ago but the price was ridiculous for the sort of thing I'd want. I might just try and find a practice room with a kit already in it and hire it out for an hour every so often.

Hi Coz,
Just got finished sending Behringer my info. There is a technician less than 5 miles away. So I am just waiting for Behringer to give me the okay to send the pad to them for the fix. Unless they decide to send me a new one.
Other than that the kit has been working fine. Still I am not amused that something can break so fast. I want to be fair and balanced in my reporting about this instrument.
I do a few shows a month with it and the drummers enjoy it. Time saved in transportation is the key. Drummers seem to take a while to get used to playing electronic kits. It is even more fun watching them get miffed when I plug it into the MPC and I show them that their timing is off.
MIDI is awesome.
Cheers,
Ian

yeah a friend of mine for a short while had a roland set with a little mpc500 that he rigged up to it some how... kind of neat turning the quantize off to record some actual realistic patterns in one go instead of the usual layering..

Is that sort of what you been doing with the kit in tandem with the mpc?

@ Debauch,
That is exactly what I do.
Midi out from the edrum kit to the mpc Midi in.
Determine the bars/measures
Set a tempo so that the drummer has a click to listen to.
Hit Record & Play on the MPC

As you stated if you turn off the quantize then you just get the swing of the drummer.
Turn on the quantize and you will have the parts played in in one go.

The cool thing with drummers is that you get nuances, fills, feel and variation all at once.
At gigs the e-kit is the fastest item to set up. Out the van, up the steps easy because it is light weight, plug in and go.
One last great thing. I charge for the studio I just built. It is a rehearsal space as well as recording studio. I show emcees the difference in the time value of money by having them pay for a drummer on the kit.

Me or the emcee tapping out a beat vs. paying the drummer to rock with them while they rhyme.

100% of the time they go with the live drummer who I have them pay $20/hour.
In that one hour they can get the rudiments of 4 songs. Mind you these are so personalized because when the emcee and the drummer are cooking it sounds awesome.

As you probably know once you have the drums down the rest is easy. They can do the real vocal again later along with whatever else.
The MightyHip Studio drummer is Berklee trained, in the pocket awesome!
Cheers,
Ian

oh okay.. sounds awesome. yeah the live nuances.. can't beat it... plus, getting proper fills and little added bits here and there is something that makes sense when a real drummer actually does it but often doesn't when you are trying to program something in manually.

Hey Ian, if you ever want some flavor, I have a friend who's a beast on playing drums...he's the drummer on Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm" aka Ju Ju House. Just google his name "William Ju Ju House" and you'll see his credentials. We use to play together back in the day. He's also Experience Unlimited's drummer.

I talk to him every now and then. Dude is busy, but he usually makes due on his promises to do what he says he's gonna do.