getuhgrip
Bring Back Transfat!
This thing is a trip!
For those not familiar, the Studio kit is essentialy a 5pc kit made up of Roland's best double zone rubber pads and the TD8 brain. The 2 cymbal pads are the same as the drum pads.
I thought the fact that the pads were rubber rather than conventional heads would be insurmountably weird feeling. They were at first, but today I spent several hours tinkering with pad parameters and found myself acclomating to them quickly. They feel harder than a plastic head and require a lighter grip on the sticks to control rolls.
The module has around 64 pre-loaded kits, none of which I found appealing to my rock tastes. There's a lot of goofy stuff: "Haunted", "Junk Yard", "Cartoon", etc. I don't know how this stuff got put on a module that retails for $995 by itself, but what do I know?
The coolness of this brain box hits home when you start checking out the range of characteristics that are adjustable in each individual bank (kick, snare, toms 1, 2, 3, crash, ride, and hats).
There's 20+ different types of each drum and cymbal. Beyond that there's size, depth, head type, tuning, and muffling. After that you can assign gate, eq and ambiance.
All these parameters can be heard and adjusted in real time, so it only takes a few seconds to find the sound you're looking for.
I tried monitoring through a bass amp (15" with no tweet), a Marshall V265 (2X12), and finally my reciever through Klipsch 10.5's. It sounded best through my stereo's 2 way speakers but I'm afraid of blowing them up! I've read that the best situation is a keyboard amp, so I'm looking for something used right now.
What really gave me a hard on is when I listened to a few tracks recorded direct through my DAW. Talk about clean! And lots of PUNCH! I was anxious about how realistic they'd sound, but wept with joy as I cranked a 2 minute track after recording. Thunder and brass!
What you hear when you're playing (even at high volume on the monitors you can still hear the sticks thumping rubber) is worlds different from what your sending down the signal path. This is just what I needed for recording in my small 12X12 studio.
I still haven't figured out how to set the rim sounds, but if I quit playing long enough to read a few more pages of the manual I'm sure I'll find out. The kick pedal is strange to watch as the beater goes forward and down. It's confusing...don't look at it! I need a new stiff spring too. It's too easy to get double bops.
All in all, I was really skeptical about selling my acoustics and jumping into this, but I'm thoroughly pleased. I want to get a few trigger blocks and another tom pad. A third cymbal will add some versatility. The brain has 2 inputs for double bass but requires a larger kick pad.
It's not the sexiest or most impressive looking kit out there, but as a recording tool, I don't know what more I could want than this kit offers.
Now......who's got a cheap keyboard amp?
For those not familiar, the Studio kit is essentialy a 5pc kit made up of Roland's best double zone rubber pads and the TD8 brain. The 2 cymbal pads are the same as the drum pads.
I thought the fact that the pads were rubber rather than conventional heads would be insurmountably weird feeling. They were at first, but today I spent several hours tinkering with pad parameters and found myself acclomating to them quickly. They feel harder than a plastic head and require a lighter grip on the sticks to control rolls.
The module has around 64 pre-loaded kits, none of which I found appealing to my rock tastes. There's a lot of goofy stuff: "Haunted", "Junk Yard", "Cartoon", etc. I don't know how this stuff got put on a module that retails for $995 by itself, but what do I know?
The coolness of this brain box hits home when you start checking out the range of characteristics that are adjustable in each individual bank (kick, snare, toms 1, 2, 3, crash, ride, and hats).
There's 20+ different types of each drum and cymbal. Beyond that there's size, depth, head type, tuning, and muffling. After that you can assign gate, eq and ambiance.
All these parameters can be heard and adjusted in real time, so it only takes a few seconds to find the sound you're looking for.
I tried monitoring through a bass amp (15" with no tweet), a Marshall V265 (2X12), and finally my reciever through Klipsch 10.5's. It sounded best through my stereo's 2 way speakers but I'm afraid of blowing them up! I've read that the best situation is a keyboard amp, so I'm looking for something used right now.
What really gave me a hard on is when I listened to a few tracks recorded direct through my DAW. Talk about clean! And lots of PUNCH! I was anxious about how realistic they'd sound, but wept with joy as I cranked a 2 minute track after recording. Thunder and brass!
What you hear when you're playing (even at high volume on the monitors you can still hear the sticks thumping rubber) is worlds different from what your sending down the signal path. This is just what I needed for recording in my small 12X12 studio.
I still haven't figured out how to set the rim sounds, but if I quit playing long enough to read a few more pages of the manual I'm sure I'll find out. The kick pedal is strange to watch as the beater goes forward and down. It's confusing...don't look at it! I need a new stiff spring too. It's too easy to get double bops.
All in all, I was really skeptical about selling my acoustics and jumping into this, but I'm thoroughly pleased. I want to get a few trigger blocks and another tom pad. A third cymbal will add some versatility. The brain has 2 inputs for double bass but requires a larger kick pad.
It's not the sexiest or most impressive looking kit out there, but as a recording tool, I don't know what more I could want than this kit offers.
Now......who's got a cheap keyboard amp?
