electronics

[palmerlouie]

nearly all pop gigs these days use electronics. having talked to a lot of drummers and kind of lost a couple of gigs due to my lack of knowledge of electronics and triggering etc. I feel i really need to start getting into this and experimenting...

unfortunately i cannot quite afford to go out and buy a full set of V drums so was thinking of adding electronics to my current set up.

i was told that the Alesis DM-5 was a good module and then i was thinking of getting the KD-7 for bass, and a couple of the roland PD7/PD6 pads for snare and hat or whatever.....i am on a budget of say ?600/700

does anyone have any suggestions for the equip or for what is good and bad? would be much appreciated, esp with regard to the module.

[palmerlouie]

or maybe just buy something like this and use accordingly???

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Roland-TD-6-El...QQcmdZViewItem

[moosetication]

The DM5 is now very old.

Based on what little I know of your situation, I would be tempted to:

1. Get into the technology, terminology, issues and everything so you can start to talk the talk. Be able to talk with confidence about triggering, rejection, crosstalk, MIDI, blah, blah, blah. Consider joining a specialist e-drum forum like www.edrumming.com.

2. Get something like that TD6KV you linked. Put some of the theory into practice. Understand what it's like to drive a module, setup the sounds, what it's like to amplify them, and so on.

3. Then add electronic into your current setup in two different forms:

a. Adding one or more pads/pedals from the e-drum kit into your A-drum setup. For example, put the e-hat and e-kick pedals in there, and perhaps a couple of tom pads.

b. Buying and applying triggers to some of your A-drums, like perhaps the kick. Triggering from regular heads through add-on piezos is very different to using a dedicated e-drum pad. For example, triggering kicks, with their huge surface area, can be a bit vexing.

[Randy walker]

outside of the kic drum, i always trigger from the shell and not the head, kic drum is the only drum yo can get away with triggering from the head and not having too much of a problem.
The DM5 or D4 work very well, the Spacemuffins 0.0 module is really nice and triggers very well. If you can find a used say Akai sampler, that's an even better route to go.
You can make your own samples, then you just need a trigger to midi interface.

[Rhythmatist]

I found the ddrum kick and snare triggers to work nicely. I also tried putting the kick trigger on the front head, using a tad more muffling on the front; worked great. Also, for triggering I found the Roland TMC6 (trigger to midi converter) a great aid in smoothing out those extraneous vibrations. What you want with triggers or pads is to send a good clean spike to the brain otherwise you will be driven crazy trying to eliminate the multiple triggering. I stopped altogether trying to trigger toms even with shell mounted triggers and once I started having to sub mix my A drums I eventually abandoned the E's as it just got to be too much to F with. If I need a special sound I'll use efx. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking e drums. I think it's important (not to mention fun) for every drummer to delve into electronics at some point in their career.

I agree with Moose re; the Alesis. I had to use one for a jobbing band and I just found it to not be as flexible as I would have liked in terms of manipulating the samples; too limited.

[kaide]

Hi!

I played V-Drums (TD-10) at covergigs for 5 years and got really tired to them. So now I'm using Roland SPD-S sampling pad along acoustic set. You can connect your kick trigger and an extra pad (maybe e-snare) to SPD-S and then use your own samples for everything. And you still have 9 pads where you can program either sounds or liveloops. I've been using this for a couple years and it works great!

So the rest of the kit has microphones and I'm also using Yamaha 01V96 Digital mixer to get drums/band sound good. There you can have gates, compression and extra reverbs.

I think you could have your electronic setup quite cheap if buy only SPD-S, bass drum trigger (RT-7K) and one pad (PD-9). Lots of world class drummers use this setup live.

[matricks]

Another thing you could do is if you have maybe an extra snare or tom laying around, you could put a tama silent mesh head on it and attach a Roland tom trigger to it and have a self-made V-Drum pad for about $50US instead of $200US if you were to buy an actual mesh head V-pad (like a PD-80R). I've used that along with my V-Drums when doing musicals and it worked well for me. Just a thought as far as a cheaper alternative.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ September 17, 2005 07:14 PM: Message edited by: matricks ]</font>

[palmerlouie]

good suggestions thanks. i just picked up a kd-7 and 2 PD-6 pads off ebay for good money so all i need now is to find a module....