Roland Electronic Drum Question

Hi All,
Anyone in here use a Roland TD set with their MPC?
I just had an excellent drummer in the studio and he rocked my MPC4000 and made it weep.
He then urged me to bu the electronic kit so that I can have drummer come through and really rock out instead of with just fingers.

So who in here has incorporated the two?
I am not trying to spend too much. So it is important to let me know if you can get subtle play from the rubber pads? (I know you can from the mes pads)

Talk to me.
Thanks,
Ian

all the mesh heads provide way superior feel and sensivity than the rubber pads and play more like real drums, because the stick rebounce is better.
there is also big differences in the pads for cymbals now as there are newer ones that also not just are thick rubber blocks anymore.

the biggest problem in setting up such a e-kit to use with the mpc (or any drum plugin) is that the factory sound modules do use special ways to trigger sounds with the different hit zones and the rim. also the hihat is special in a way as it not only determines where it gets hit center or at the edge, but also how much it is open.

you have to find out how many different zones are sent from the pads and how to map it to the mpc. i think with a mpc 4000 you have the only mpc that can do this better than all the others, because of keygroups which might help here.

peace, rez

Thanks Rez.

I just ordered the Behringer XD80 kit (picture below has a different name due to different market).
It should arrive on Tuesday.
I will most definitely make a video about the process as I have not seen one regarding the MPC4000 and an electronic drum kit.

I will also do a thorough review of the Behringer kit.
It is almost the same as the Alesis kit.
I have noticed that the electronic kits are popping out fast lately.
I gather the license for the patent is being shared or the same company is making the Alesis and Behringer model and they just put the different brand on it.
The behringer kit is super affordable and comes with the kick pedal.





Cheers,
Ian

PS " I am starting a live music open mic with a band in Washington DC to accompany my website and app MightyHip.com"

I'm looking to get an electronic kit - initially because my 8 year old wants to start learning at home, but of course as I investigated it more I realised daddy wants to learn the drums properly as well

First thing I looked into was the possibility of hooking up third party sounds (my own via MPC or Maschine, or vsts like superior drummer etc), so I downloaded all the manuals for the various kit brains/modules.

As far as I can tell, each 'area' on the drum is assigned a specific MIDI note number, so on a Roland PDX mesh you get a MIDI note for the rim and a midi note for the head. On some Yamaha snares you get three zones; head, bottom rim and top rim.

Similarly with the cymbals you get up to three MIDI notes (bell, bow and edge). I'm not sure how they handle the open/close or pedal hat, or the choke.

Beyond that, I think hitting the head itself in different areas does not register anything different in your VST, it will be completely unaware as there is no unique MIDI trigger for head position - I think only the sounds generated directly by the actual drum kit brain are able to provide variance in that respect (and only on the more expensive models).

That said, I might be wrong, but certainly from watching/listening to demos of the entry level TD1-KV kit, I'm not hearing anything beyond it picking up velocity variances over 2 or 3 velocity zones. I had a play of the TD30KV in a shop the other day and that's fairly realistic thanks to the 'supernatural' stuff.

I am not aware of any brand that offers, say, three MIDI note zones within the head itself. So for third party sounds via MIDI the best you can do is set up velocity zones and random timbre playback. All MPCs can handle the velocity zones, the 5000/ MPC Software can handle random zone playback (but not at the same time as velocity switching) and JJOSXL can do both simultaneously.

As for the Alesis, I tended to disregard fairly quickly it due to the Akai/inMusic ownership - I'm certainly seeing a lot of end user reviews moaning about poor hardware quality, and any pro reviews seemed very familiar (to us MPC users) as they were all mentioning various bugs that they were assured would be fixed 'imminently'

In terms of the sounds that come with the kits, I did think the Alesis sounds were pretty good, but the Yamaha demos were also very nice. The Roland IMO are the worse of the lot - mainly as they just didn't seem to have any beefy, filthy vintage sounding stuff, it all seems pretty clean or rock.

I was checking out a V Drums demo a few months back which looked amazing, then I realised it was 5 grand so I closed the page and stopped dreaming...

I've been dabbling with a Korg Wavedrum which is completely incompatible with anything other than live playing and recording, but it's a lot of fun... apart from the bruise I've got that's down to the bone on one of my fingers from going a bit overboard with it!

^ I have the same problem when i get my hands on a bass guitar. No regular practice plus enjoying myself too much always leads to blistered fingertips...

Hi All,
I just read the instructions for the behringer kit.
See the link page 25
http://www.behringer.com/assets/XD80USB_QSG_WW.pdf

It has MIDI Note ID 0-127 in the voice area.
So That means I should be able to assign specific zones to midi notes.

Looks like the zones are(page24)
Kick
HiHat: Open, Half, Closed, Splash/Chick
Snare and Toms: Rim, Head
Crash and Ride: Choke, Edge, Bow

Cheers,
Ian

PS "I hope they have a midi implementation chart.

I guess the open/close hihat work with CC message from the hihat footpedal.

peace

sounds like something that might be not too complicated to program on battery.

I use a roland td-12 with an mpc1000 and can add a few points to the discussion. I don't have the rubberepads hrubber cymbals only) so I can't comment on that, but here's what iehave learned:

The biggest difficulty you will run into is getting a satisfying hi hat response. The td12 (and probably others) is able to do semi-open sounds... as you lift your foot off the hihat pedal slowly, they get sloshier and more open (but its not an open sound, its much nicer). you can also choke off an open sound by closing the pedal. This action is super important, and as far as I know, no common sampler (perhaps 2box?) allows you to use a cc to emulate this. I tried with battery, kontakt, mpc1000 and a yamhha a3000, no joy at all. As soon as you play with the hihat pedal and the td12 module the samplers feel dead and useless. I use the native hihat sounds from the module for the most part, and sometimes layer on sampled hits.

The snare emits a cc message before the note on, which indicates position (distance between center and edge). No sampler that I've found lets you cross fade between samples or select samples by cc. However, I tend to add an extra layer and map the cc to both amplitude and the opening of a hpf, which graduadly brings in a ringing sound as I approach the edge. Again, the td12 module does a fine job of this, and I sometimes play a main snare sample from the mpc, and allow a quiet and hpf/bpf version of the modules snare to ring in the background. Makes a little difference to the feel.

The mpc doesn't let you randomly change samples by external midi, only internally w_en you play the pads. I work around this by having three programs that are nearly identical, and a track which constantly sends midi pc to rapidly switch programs. When playing, this simulates a round robin or random functien, but maintaining three programs of variations, especially if they also are velocity mapped, is fiddly and tiresome. But it's often worth the effort to get a more realistic feel.

Assigning a crash and ride sample to a rubber pad is kinda lame. Real cymbals respond differently to a hit if they are already vibrating. Softsamplers like superior drummer take this into account and start using cymbal wash samples if you hit repeatedly. The mpc just can't do anything like this.

You'll note I mentioned feel many times. Having paid h heck of a lot for the td12 I really wanna maximize what it's capable of. Just assigning a sample to a pad/cymbal is easy but feels totally dead and is no fun to play at all.

Regarding dynamics, I can't quite figure it out but the mpc feels compressed and lifeless. It is also unfriendly that the low velocity samples need to be normalized. So if you record a quiet, medium and loud real snare with a mic, then assign these to the mpc pad, it'll be completely wrong and you must normalize each, then adjust the range by ear. Annoying, and the velocity->loudness curve doesn't feel quite right anyway. You can partially compensate by adjusting the velocity response of the triggers in the module, but the mpc is definitely not 'linear' in some difficult to define way. I have not done empirical testing just adjusting by feel and ear and its never sitting quite right.

In summary, despite the fact that I'm getting a bit sick of the sounds in the td12 module after many years, I still use the internal sounds a lot because the playing feel is so important, especially the vh11 hihat and pedal. Driving the mpc as a drumkit sampler is certainly possible, but I am thinking of going back to my yamaha a3000 sampler for the randomization, velocity sensitivity and layering options. The mpc will do in a pinch but its too limited to do a kit that feels good and responds well. Feeling good and responding well is important in an instrument that only has a couple of different notes, so you shouldn't underestimate it.

For cymbals, I get much improved sound by using superior drummer. I sometices use more of its instruments if I want an acoustic sound, but I simply love the cymbal washes and use them exclusively.

Specialist samplers such as the 2box sound very interesting as I guess they have solved many of the above issues, but the price is way out of my league.

The kit came in the mail. It is light weight, sturdy, the pedal is great, the sounds are great, it is easy to use, easy to disassemble, the pads have a great bounce, it is low noise, the midi works perfectly with the mpc4000 and my Boss DR880.
Here is a quick video I slapped together. I will make a more indepth one regarding usage with the MPC4000.

I kinda rushed through the kits. THe only thing I didn't test is the crash or ride choke. One of them is supposed to be chokeable I think. The kit is 64 polyphony. Our band and studio drummer loves it.

Behringer XD80 US$399 with kick pedal.

HArd to find a lot of places do not have it in their warehouses. I ordered the last one that was at Full Compass online. Sweetwater was not getting another shipment for a while. Guitar Center didn't know it existed.

They've got these in thomann for £300 now

http://www.thomann.de/gb/behringer_xd80 ... um_set.htm

From the demos on youtube it sounds like there's a lot of 'machine gunning' so I guess there's not many, if any, variants in timbre coming with the module itself, but I don't think that's a problem if it's hooking up with VST samplers like Superior when it comes to recording, assuming it outputs all the required MIDI.

What is it like acoustically, i.e. how loud are those rubber pads when you are playing on headphones?

Does the hat send out the open/close CC messages?

Wondering if these are easy to convert to mesh heads, there's a lot of tutorials on how to do this for the Alesis version

Hi Tutor,
I think the conversion has to be easy as you can unscrew the top off of the heads. You can also simply buy need roland heads and plug them into it.
The midi works well on the hi-hat. Obviously not as realistic and nuanced as a true hi-hat.

The pads are not loud at all. These rubber pads are better than the ones used 6 years ago. They have a nice bounce and the sound is deadened. In the video you can hear the tapping sound if you listen closely.
Maybe I will make that video of just the playing without sound.

I figured out the choke. you have to grab specific corners of the cymbal. It is a great kit.
Peace
Ian

One of my drum pads is not responding loud when it is hit.
I am going to see what the problem is.
I did not buy it long ago so it should still be under warranty.
Take note of this before you buy the Behringer XD80 drum kit.

Cheers,
Ian

One of my pads on my relatively new Behringer XD80 drum kit, the snare, has broken. When you hit it the volume comes out low. I have done everything but open it up. So I know that the cables are fine and the settings are fine as well. The pad has never been dropped and I do not rest things on it.
I have contacted Behringer and they have said that they will replace it when I provide the serial number and the receipt of purchase. So I am hopeful that all will end well.

However....

Cheers,
Ian