Drum PAds - Alesis/Ion - HELP..???

[oolong]

Cool, thanks for the help everyone. Looks like Yamaha all the way for Mr Cheap over here..! Audio, MIDI plus it looks like something my 18 month old daughter would play with. Can't go wrong..

Oolong

[echosonic]

Cool, thanks for the help everyone. Looks like Yamaha all the way for Mr Cheap over here..! Audio, MIDI plus it looks like something my 18 month old daughter would play with. Can't go wrong..

Oolong

Good call Mr Oolong. Let us know how you;re getting on with it (on musicradar)

[rachel]

I want to design a kind of x0x interface, but without the sound generator.

My idea is to take the ROM from a Roland 626 as a starting point,
create an LCD style interface like the 707 and have the 16 programmable steps light up l
ike the 909. The pads would be not as big as an MPC but bigger than the 626 and
velocity sensitive, of course.

And then it has a huge pattern bank editable on the fly, with a pattern change
in edit mode (something only a 606 can do), swing, flams and all the rests (pun).

Instead of a tone generator it would just drive a module like a Drumstation or
an R8M, and come with preset maps for all kinds of stuff.

The catch is of course, getting this designed by an expert and then enough
money to produce a prototype and get a product line in China or something.
But I estimate the cost to be arguably high USD 595.

Does anyone else think this would be a cool tool? A hand held X0X pattern
programmer that you sync to your computer for recording, live tweaking acid
style and jamming?


rachel

[oolong]

The velocity sensitivity feature intruiges me. Since I started looking at e-drum stuff, I noticed a few of the smaller devices have velocity sensitive buttons. Are they designed for the user to tap into with their fingers (as opposed to hit with sticks..?). How do people find those to use..? I imagine it'd get very fiddly.

To me, the holy grail of e-drum machines (if mimicing acoustic drums is your aim) is some kind of built-in intelligence that recognises where ghosted notes/different velocities would apply and puts them in automatically, as opposed to relying on a velocity-sensitive input. You could have user-defined tolerances to control this, but ultimately it means the device recognising the pattern (or matching it to a best-fit from its memory) and interpretting it to make it sound more realistic.

Just a thought.

[echosonic]

Does anyone else think this would be a cool tool? A hand held X0X pattern programmer that you sync to your computer for recording, live tweaking acid style and jamming?

Tenori-On? Monome?

[Ten Flew South]

The velocity sensitivity feature intruiges me. Since I started looking at e-drum stuff, I noticed a few of the smaller devices have velocity sensitive buttons. Are they designed for the user to tap into with their fingers (as opposed to hit with sticks..?). How do people find those to use..? I imagine it'd get very fiddly.

To me, the holy grail of e-drum machines (if mimicing acoustic drums is your aim) is some kind of built-in intelligence that recognises where ghosted notes/different velocities would apply and puts them in automatically, as opposed to relying on a velocity-sensitive input. You could have user-defined tolerances to control this, but ultimately it means the device recognising the pattern (or matching it to a best-fit from its memory) and interpretting it to make it sound more realistic.

Just a thought.

So long as you've programmed the patches right for the e-drum, you can get ghost notes with the sticks anyway. That's kind of the point. (although we're talking clever programming here, with complex choke groups mapped for different samples and velocities, and don't ask me how it would actually be done because just typing it started hurting my brain :lol:

The velocity isn't just affecting the volume. It's a different beast. So hitting a snare harder will give it different sonic properties, as well as making it louder.
So the idea is that you map different samples for each velocity range, then you get them sounding completely real. A good sample library that you would be triggering will be mapped this way anyway.

You can take it a step further and have layers. I want one of those Ion units to experiment with. I like the idea of having an octave of bass layered with drums in such a way that hitting a pad at a certain velocity triggers a bass note along with the drum sound, so you can hit out a drum and bass pattern at the same time.

As for the little pads on midi controller keyboards and suchlike, yeah they're great, a lot more responsive and inspiring to use than the keys.

(this is why you would really want a unit with midi out, otherwise you're instantly limited by how the module that comes with the kit is programmed. I said before that if you didn't want midi out then that's ok, but I can't understand why you would want one without it - it's kind of the whole point as far as creativity and flexibility is concerned).

[cerodios]

I guess the Alesis Performance Pads has better pads than the Alesis Control Pad but at least the "Control Pad" pads i think are not too good bad sensitivty and the pads "leak" so that you may sound more than one pad even though you are just striking one. They also have the "feelers" of the pads in a circle shape in the middle or something so you have to hit right in the middle to get a sound... but as i said i'm talking about the cheaper version, the "Alesis ControlPad" but you might want to check out the pads of the alesis before you buy