TD20 Woes

A

acattoir

New member
Are any of you a super stud, master of time space and dimension, td20 master? I'm finding the snare on my kit to be a massive frustration and also think that there is a basic flaw in the design. I've had a few other kits, even a Simmons SDS7 with all the cards! You gotta be old to know that reference. I digress.

Unless I am missing a menu somewhere. It appears to me that ONLY 1 snare sample may be accessed at a time. The problem with this is that when you hit the head and rim together you either get a rimshot sample or a head sample only. When you hit the head and rim of a real drum you get the body of the head sound plus the crack of the rim. The TD20 rim sounds are nice but are thin. I have turned off the zone sensor parameter so I don't get the "boink" sound.

Even the new crappy cheap Simmons drums give you both samples at once when you hit a rim shot.

Am I missing something.

I would be willing to buy a separate brain just for the snare but would be interested in recommendations for which mfg has the best snare sounds.

I am using the newest Hart snare pad, the one thats based on a hammered 13" snare shell.

Opinions?

The high hat trigger sucks big green ones too, but I'll save that for another time.

ac
 
acattoir said:
Unless I am missing a menu somewhere. It appears to me that ONLY 1 snare sample may be accessed at a time. The problem with this is that when you hit the head and rim together you either get a rimshot sample or a head sample only. When you hit the head and rim of a real drum you get the body of the head sound plus the crack of the rim. The TD20 rim sounds are nice but are thin. I have turned off the zone sensor parameter so I don't get the "boink" sound.

Am I missing something.

I am using the newest Hart snare pad, the one thats based on a hammered 13" snare shell.
Click to expand...

Having owned multiple Roland brains over the years (and a VDrum kit now), my #1 complaint is that they are designed to work really well with their own trigger pads and not as well with others. The TD20 has three-way triggering for snare samples (head, rim only, and head&rim together) with the head&rim together trigger giving plenty of drum body sound, but it tends to work best only on the PD105 / PD125 trigger pads, in my experience. The positional sensing is also quite useful and realistic, but again - only on the Roland pads that support it.

Short of purchasing a new trigger pad, have you gone through the Trigger Setup menu to specify the type of trigger input you're using? You might try telling the TD brain that your trigger is a PD105 or PD125 and see what happens...
 
KineticSound said:
Having owned multiple Roland brains over the years (and a VDrum kit now), my #1 complaint is that they are designed to work really well with their own trigger pads and not as well with others. The TD20 has three-way triggering for snare samples (head, rim only, and head&rim together) with the head&rim together trigger giving plenty of drum body sound, but it tends to work best only on the PD105 / PD125 trigger pads, in my experience. The positional sensing is also quite useful and realistic, but again - only on the Roland pads that support it.

Short of purchasing a new trigger pad, have you gone through the Trigger Setup menu to specify the type of trigger input you're using? You might try telling the TD brain that your trigger is a PD105 or PD125 and see what happens...
Click to expand...

Hmmmm. The only head and rim parameter that I find is the one that allows you to adjust the head and rim at the same time, which I use, but I do not hear the head sample when hitting the rim, only the sample selected for the rim.

The Hart drum for me works much better than the Roland. The hot spot is greatly reduced and the rim triggers are more consistent. I actually wish I had purchased a high end set of Hart drums instead of the Roland.

I did talk to Roland about my snare problems but the person I talked too didn't seem to know much. No help there.

Is there a hidden menu that allows head and rim to be both fired? It seems I've looked everywhere.

The positional sensor works fine on the Hart snare but I don't find it useful that often so I've turned it off.

Thanks for the response.

ac
 
OK, If anybody is interested. Here is what I did as a work around for the Roland TD-20 snare problem, least I think it's a problem.

I split the snare trigger into two descrete outs. Routed my "head" sound as normal through the snare channel and ran the "rim" through the aux 1 and selected my rim sound there. Turned off the position sensor in both channels and it works great.
The really cool thing about this is that in addition to getting both head and rim samples at the same time the slight crosstalk between the head and rim triggers means that even if you don't hit a perfectly clean rim shot the sound is still similar and not this big drastic difference between the head and rim samples. It's almost like a real drum. Haven't got this far but using the direct outs I can run the rim sample and snare sample on their own tracks, meaning different processing for each. So maybe a room verb on the head and a drum booth on the rim or some such nonsense.

If any of you give this a try I'd love to hear about it. I'm still obsessing over the hats. Hopefully I'll come up with some tricks there. All the conventional ideas have failed in my opinion.

ac
 
Interesting idea. I might experiment with some of that routing as well... I've been playing with ways to double-up the samples on certain drums (for instance, add a tambourine sample on top of a rimshot - but on a snare rimshot of my choice, not one of Roland's pre-selected snare/tamb combos).

One would think that you could run a splitter off of the trigger cable and send the trigger signal to both aux 1 and 2 at the same time, triggering rim on aux 1 while triggering tamb on aux 2. I wonder, though, if a splitter would kill the signal strength and cause dropouts. One would assume that the rimshot signal would be strong enough, but... we'll see.

The other thing I've been playing with that you might want to try is the pattern layering. If you hit "pattern" and select "user ptn", you can record just a single sample hit from whatever kit you like. Then, go to the kit you want to play/record in a song, hit "menu", then "Ptn", strike the pad you want to layer the trigger on, and then select the user pattern you just created. In doing this, every time you hit the trigger, you'll hear both the sample assigned to the pad, plus the brain will playback the sample pattern (your single hit from the other kit). disclaimer: This doesn't work when you're playing back another pattern or song from the drum brain at the same time.
 
Hey, thanks for the pattern idea. Quite brilliant! It seems to me that you should be able to trigger multiple channels from one trigger source. Even the small amount of head to rim crosstalk gives me a partial trigger of the aux channel. And, usually the sensitivity is less than 12 so there is a lot of room to ramp that up.

My other favorite whine is that the open hi-hat plays a lot louder than the closed sample. Right now, I play the ride patterns on the bow of the pad and hit the open hat stuff on the rim, which I have the gain trimmed way down. It works but is a pain. Also if you send the hat to the ambience, it gets phased. It's amazing that the king of e-percussion with it high price hasn't addressed this either.

Oh and while I'm at it, the newer smooth tube stand is absoute crap in imho. Nothing stays where you set it and no locks are provided. The cymbal boom clamps are especially bad.

If I had it to do again I'd get a Gibraltar (or similar) rack and hang Hart pads on it (the mesh ones).

ac
 
acattoir said:
My other favorite whine is that the open hi-hat plays a lot louder than the closed sample. Right now, I play the ride patterns on the bow of the pad and hit the open hat stuff on the rim, which I have the gain trimmed way down. It works but is a pain. Also if you send the hat to the ambience, it gets phased. It's amazing that the king of e-percussion with it high price hasn't addressed this either.
Click to expand...

I hear you on that. My V-Drum kit is a couple years old, so up until a few months back, I was using a PD-7 as my hi-hat trigger, which was complete crap. Switching to a CY-5 trigger for the hi-hat has helped, but it has its flaws, too. My favorite hi-hat solution? Real Zildjian A Customs mic'ed up, with the preamp output into the "mix in" jack on my V-Drums, so I can blend the mic signal with my main L/R output. :D
 
Cool idea on the hats. Real is superior. I've done my crashes hybrid style but still used the 20's hats. I like being punished I guess.

ac
 
Just wanted to append ( for those that may not already know) that the TDW-20 expansion card Roland just recently released now openly allows two samples simultaneously easily without all the frustrating re-routing of samples/outputs. It's half the cost of an intermediate drumset though.
 
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