As I’ve said in the past, I’ve been looking for something that would allow me the freedom of hitting something with sticks, to approximate as much as possible what I can do on a real kit. Up until yesterday, the closest I could have hoped to get was the Alesis ControlPad. However, now I know that the ControlPad, whilst a nice piece of kit, pales in comparison to what even a low-end set of electronic drums can do for me in this sense.

Before I start, here are a few pics of the DD502 in my home setup…

The kit has turned out to be a wise investment. Today, I finally got around to plugging it into my Mac (via the MIDI interface on my Behringer BCF2000), and having a go at playing some Virtual instruments with it. I tried Native Instruments Battery 3 (which is my mainstay at the moment when it comes to drums!). Battery’s ‘Learn’ function meant that I could take an existing kit (in this case Heavy Rock), and learn the note that each pad was inputting, thereby assigning it to the individual pads.

After doing so, I had my first bash around, quickly finding that there was something strange going on with the velocity of some of the pads. Whilst the Kick drum pad seemed to output the entire range of velocities, the main drum pads only seemed to want to go up to 64. Not sure why this is, but a quick tweak of the velocity transform in Logic quickly solved the problem – I added about 35 to every tap. Only trouble is it now means that the lowest I get is 35 – meaning that the lower end of the velocity scale is slightly less expressive. This is something that I hope I can sort within Battery, so I’ll report back when I know more.

The second issue was latency. Battery tends to be quite latency-heavy anyway, and I had to switch on the low-latency mode to make sure that the pads felt like they were responding when I hit them. The latency was still only small when this mode was off, but it was enough to be noticable on faster phrases. All-in-all, latency wouldnt be an issue in the end anyway, as I could always use one of the built-in module drumkits that came with the DD502 to monitor whilst recording, so not much of an issue.

Which takes me to the internal sounds on the unit. Overall, they’re not too bad, though the quality of the samples isn’t great, it’s by far good enough to practice, and probably for most simple live situations. The Hi-Hats have a tendancy to be a bit loud, but that’s easily remedied by, you guessed it, reducing the volume of that voice. Easy as a few key taps on the module.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling for now – will update when I’ve had a chance to fiddle firther…

Suffice to say, the last few days have been kind of trying – life has a way of testing you to the hilt, and it’s kind of been like that. Its been the kind of time I’ve been glad to have friends and family around, and a wonderful Wife.  But, I needed a change of scene, so I drove to the music shop with aformentioned wonderful Wife and took the Alesis ControlPad back (again).

Needless to say, I was kind of pissed off that this second one still didnt work, and I made that apparent, especially when they were initially going to give me just store credit rather than the full refund I was entitled to. However, after a (tiny) bit of heated debate on the content of the Sales Of Goods Act, the whole scene calmed down and I asked for, and was granted a full refund. As I was about to take it, the Manager of the place said “How’s about if I do you a deal?”. I was skeptical at this point, as the only thing remotely similar to what I wanted was a Roland Drum controller, and those things are well outside my price range.

However! What was to come next completely blew me away. Due to the inconvenience of me driving back and forth three times to buy and exchange various ControlPad units, the manager offered me a deal I couldnt refuse…

The Legacy DD502 (usually £249), for £175.

If you don’t know what the Legacy DD502 is, then wonder no longer…

It’s basically what I actually wanted from the start, but was, until now, out of my price range. It’s a lower range (but suprisingly good!) electronic drum kit. It is as near as I’m going to get in the next few years to owning a set of V-Drums! It has a set of four normal drum pads (snare and 3 toms), a Kick drum with pedal, a Hi-Hat controller pedal, and three cymbals (Hi-Hat, Crash and Ride by default). It also comes with a basic little drum machine box into which all of these plug. The machine has a fair selection of kits to play with, with some bad MIDI toons to play along to, and customizable banks into which you can assign your own choice of the available drums, and construct your own kits from the 200+ sounds available. It also has the all-important MIDI-out port for using the kit to trigger drums in Logic, Battery 3 etc…

Not bad!!!!

To put it mildly, I almost bit his arm off for that price! Talk about goodwill gesture! I’ve only just ut the thing together and had a quick bash around on it, but for the price I’ve got to say I’m impressed. Of course, compared to the higher-qualit Roland V-Drums, it doesnt stand a chance, but as a starter electronic kit, and for triggering sounds, I rekon it’s gonna be a winner.

First impressions are good. The whole thing isn’t built badly at all. The frame is aluminium, and the fittings, whilst being plastic, seem to be strong enough to withstand a good bashing. The pedals are particularly good for the price, with the bass pedal being a proper pedal with chain action and everything. Apart from the black fittings, there seems to be a reasonable of metal in this thing (as I can testify carrying it in from the car!). The pads themselves are black plastic surrounds with relatively convincing skin-feel surfaces. The surfaces themselves are actually ‘real’ drum skins, and dont have a bad feel at all. There’s enough rebound for a reasonably nice feel for flams etc, and they’re much better than the rubber pads that usually come with the lower end kits.

The cymbals are plastic too, with foam rubber covering the top surfaces. They’re on ‘real’ cymbal stands, so do actually rock when hit, giving a better illusion than many other cheaper kits. Overall the cymbals are a bit loud off the bat, but I know these can be altered individually anyway, so I’ll play with that later. Overall, the feel of the kit is very good for the price.

I’m yet to play properly, and also yet to try the MIDI-out for playing drums on the mac, but so far, so good. I’ll report back (with proper photos of the real thing!) in the next few days, so watch this space…!

For more details visit http://www.legacymusicalinstruments.com/productdetails/DD502/

UPDATE: I’ve just found an ebay auction selling the same thing under a different name for an American visitor to the site. Its got a great video demo of this kit – take a look!

http://tinyurl.com/38xjcv

The first one I had had an issue with one of the pads, in that it was sending out random rubbish when I hit it, so was triggering all sorts of things. I swapped it out today for another one, and when I got it home, I plugged it in and tried each pad individually. All worked fine – with no issues! Hurrah! Good yes?

No!

When I started actually playing something with both sticks, I found this one had a different problem…! When more than one pad was triggered at one time, they would invariably not both fire. Only the one was ending up being input. I checked this by recording me simultaneously hitting the hi-hat and snare over and over. This showed up that about one in five times, the snare wouldn’t fire. This would happen no matter what I played together – one of the pads wouldn’t fire intermittently. This was incredibly frustrating, and after a 70 mile round-trip to get the replacement, I’ve had enough. This wasn’t happening even this morning with the last unit I had, even though one of the pads was knackered.

Unfortunately, its reduced this great device to being totally useless, and I’m not prepared to go through the rigmarole of chancing another unit. Alesis have got to get their quality control sorted This has left me extremely disappointed, and unlikely to chance one of their controllers again.

In short – My experience hasn’t been favourable. You may get a good one, but I’m afraid that after two dodgy units, I’m going to be waiting for Alesis to sort out the QC issues before diving in again. Its a shame, because I really like this unit.

Click Here for drummyness!

So… recently I’ve started looking around for something else. My dream drum input device would be a set of nice Roland V-Drums – http://www.roland.co.uk/drum_kits.asp – Yum. However, with those starting at £450 for the most basic of basic models, it was kind of out of my reach.

This month, a review in Computer Music highlighted a new drum control surface – the Alesis ControlPad. they gave it a good review, and on reading, it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for…

This was a cheap (£149 – bought for £140) drum controller – designed to be played with sticks – exactly what I was looking for! I got myself down to SoundControl and picked me one up.

After getting it home, I plugged it in and played away. It’s a lot diferent to hitting those small Trgger Finger pads with my fingers – it actually vaguely feels like I’m hitting a drum. The rubber pads have quite a nice response to them, and enable you to do rolls and flams fairly easily. The configuration is a snap (just plug it in and Logic picks it up – Not so sureabout cubase, but should be pretty straightforward). The config on the actual device is simple – you get to choose from various preset layouts (or design your own), and can choose from a selection of velocity curves. Then you just bang away.

You need a set of sticks for this baby – finger tapping aint really an option, as you’ll just get the quietest of taps out of it like that. It also has various sockets at the back for numerous switches – one for kick, one for hi-hat pedal, two for additional trigger inputs (available seperately), and also an inc/dec double footswitch for selecting patches if required.

Also around the back are standard 5-pin DIN MIDI-IN and OUT, for connection to other MIDI equipment. This is all rounded off my a USB socket for PC/Mac connection.

The pedals can be standard non-latching jobs (I’m just using my keyboard sustain pedal for one at the moment, till I pick up some more). The only gripe (and its not much of one!) is that the kick pedal outputs at a standard 64 velocity, which is non-editable. This isnt really much of a problem, as its changable in-software, but it would have rounded off an otherwise very rounded package…

Overall, my initial reaction is definitely positive. It’s much more suitable for my style than the Trigger finger (which was a nice piece of kit – just not suitable for me!). I’m lookin gforward to having a play with this, and will report back my findings. However – untilthen – here are my first impression scores :-

• Build Quality – 9/10
• Performance – 9/10
• Usability – 9/10
• Value – 10/10
• Overall – 9/10

This is obviously a first impression, but I’ll be posting some examples of me using it soon, so stay tuned.

Let me explain…

Two weeks or so ago, I was recording on Cubase, and had a bit if a crash. Nothing terribly unusual there, except this time, it’d been about 2 hours since I saved (stupid boy!) and I lost a load of stuff. Again, not too unusual – its happened before. However, this time, it really got on my nerves – so much that I decided to do something I’d never even considered up until now – have a look again at Logic Pro. I’ve had the idea of going ‘Mac Native’ for a while now, but havent due to the stupid cost of Logic Pro 7 on the mac (a penny under £700 in most places). However – Apple have had a bit of a revalation. I went to the apple site to look up the specs etc for Logic, and found out, much to my suprise, that a new product (or suite of products) has been released by Apple… Logic Studio.

Logic Studio contains not only the newly spanky Logic Pro 8, but also a great app called ‘Mainstage’, designed for Live use (Basically giving you access to All Logic’s instruments and effects in a live environment), and also Jam Packs 1 – 5 (normally £75 each!), and also, Soundtrack Pro, the Video Audio software.

What price this cracking bundle of software? £1000?

no!

£319.

£319 – yes you saw right. Available for £275 on the interwebs (Amazon.co.uk for example), or even cheaper on Ebay (original now – not hooky copy!). Not only has it been brought down to a reasonable cost, but it’s now it’s dongleless… freeing up a USB port, and also freeing you from the pain-in-the-ass of the archaic copy-protection that has plagued most decent DAW software for the last 10 years!

Cor!

So – I promptly decided to have a go. And I havent looked back! At the moment, the prospects of me returning to Cubase are extremely slim. I have the majority of what I need in Logic Studio (of which I will produce a feature rundown and review fairly soon), and am now OS X native with my DAW. I never thought this would happen, but now Apple have gone and produced such a fantastic piece of software with Logic Studio, I can see no reason to shackle myself with Windows any longer!

Long live OS X, and (hopefully), good riddance to Windows as a going concern.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Well…

After a lot of agonizing, I’ve finally decided to go for one of the new 20″ iMacs. It’ll kind of be the end of an era, and will be the first time I haven’t had a big-box PC in the house for about 14 years. I was all Amiga before that, so it doesn’t count

After quite a bit of research, I’ve come to the conclusion that going for an intel-based iMac, dual-booted with Windows and OS X will be, in the long run, a much better prospect than my current setup. I ordered it today from a supplier in Cardiff, and hopefully, they’ll have stock early next week, or even (if I’m lucky) tomorrow.

Am I sad to leave PCs behind? Well… I’ve got mixed feelings. In reality, I’m only going half-way, as although I won’t have a PC here, I’ll still have a Windows ‘box’ on my Mac (more of a Windows ‘panel’ I suppose..!). I dont think it’ll be in the near future that I leave the world of Bill as a permanently ‘past’ experience. Truth be told, the iMac I’m getting is actually more powerful than even my Dual 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo machine. It’s a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, so a slght boost in that department over a machine that I havent really taxed since I upgraded it about 5 months ago.

I’m definitely going to be posting about my experiences getting everything up and running on my new setup. I’ve found that all the info on the web is very fragmented, and to gather some of it together would be a good idea. Keep posted!

Google Search for Cubase with Bootcamp

Good news! Looks, from general Consensus, that SX3 on Bootcamp is a very viable option. Looks like I may be swapping both my PC and current G5 iMac for a single solitary (and silent!) Intel iMac at some point in the not-too-distant-future. I’m obviously going to do some more research, but it’s looking good!

The only real issue flagged up has been with using the Mac’s internal sound card for recoding. However, any external firewire etc. interfaces seem to work fine.

I’ll report back when I know more…!

Something just occured to me. Basically – I want one of these….

It’s one of the new iMacs that I was wittering on about in my last post. I tried one today in the Apple premium reseller in Cardiff, and I’m smitten. Sad I know, but there we go. What I’m trying to work out is whether this machine (a Core 2 Duo-based monster) with XP and 2Gb of RAM, would be enough to successfully run my current recording software well.

I’d love more than anything to get rid of my big-box PC and replace it with a single one of these with a dual-boot of Windows XP and OS X. I’d use OS X for everything apart from the recording. The only reason I stick with Windows for the recording is that all the software I have for recording is Windows based, and having to rebuy everything on Mac would be prohibitively expensive, as well as being a total pain in the ass.

The main problem is that I’m not sure how good the architecture of the Mac is when it has Windows running on it. I’d need at least 2Gb RAM, which isn’t a problem, but I still dont know how well everything would run.

Obviously, I’d be using Windows drivers, but I dont know what potential problems there are for compatibility etc. Thing is, after a quick google, I’m none the wiser. Nobody seems to have tried this yet – or at least nobody seems to have documanted their attempts…

If anyone has tried this, please get in contact – I’d love to know how it went. Until then, I’ll keep looking.

Got it out of the box, and had a quick look. Seems well built, though its not that heavy, and certainly doesnt feel like a high-end pro piece of kit. However, it does feel like it could take a bit of beating. The pads feel nice and smooth, and dont feel loose or cheap, and I suppose that thats the most important part of this controller. It was a breeze to set up once I’d installed the proper drivers. You can install it with the standard Windows drivers, but as I have another M-audio device (a Keystation 61es), they both disappear – not good, and a problem with the earlier drivers apparently. Its Mac compatible, and is a standard Core MIDI device.

Once it showed up in Cubase, I fired up Battery 3 and started bashing away (ahem…). My initial reaction was that it’s definitely going to take a bit of getting used to. There is no in-built preset for Battery, and so the mapping was a bit weird (I used the rock kit as the test kit). Te velocity response seems good, and you can apparently change between a selection of velocity curves.

The programming software is called Enigma. It allows you to easily mess around with the presets on the unit, assigning all sorts of controllers to various aspects of the device (knobs, sliders, pressure-sensitivity on the pads). I havent had to much of a play wit this yet – all I’ve done is reassign some of the output notes to make a more sensible mapping for the drums on the Rock Kit in Battery. However – I’ll be getting things set up properly when I get a bit more time.

All-in-all, I like the thing. Its not quite as easy to use as I’d have liked, but I think that when I get used to it, it’ll definitely do what its designed to do, and make inputting drum tracks that little bit easier. As I get used to it, I’ll post my findings.

All in all – about 8 out of 10.

Pros? – Cheapish, plenty to program, feels nice, compact.

Cons? – Enigma could be a little easier to use, not ‘pro’ standard build (though by no means bad!).