Alesis USB Pro Drum Kit

[brandondrury]

Has anyone heard anything about the Alesis USB Pro Drum Kit? I'm pretty sure I'll be buying this one very soon.

All pads have dual zones and there is no typical drum brain. The biggest thing is the cymbals are gold. I don't give a damn if the cymbals look like metal but I have a feeling that this would allow me to convince some bands to go with the electronic drum option.

YouTube - NAMM 2008 Alesis USB Pro Drumkit Electronic Drum Kit with US

Brandon

[jcpatte2]

Hey Brandon,

I'm very interested in this kit as well. Dual zones, chokable cymbals, no synth sounds just a solid i/o make it seem appealing to me. I'm trying to make big boy records in my home with little to no acoustic treatment outside of the spare bedroom used for my studio setup and can't disturb the neighbors. So this seems like a logical way to trigger drum samples.

I also ran across this - DDrum Electronic Percussion DDTTKIT Drum Trigger Kit (DDrum DDTTKIT Drum Trigger Kit from zZounds.com!). And after reading some of your other threads with concerns about getting players to play e-drums instead of their crappy kits, as well as, room issues I was wondering what you thought about just triggering drum sounds off Toontrack or whatever. Anyway just wanted another opinion on this and it's uses.

Later,

Justin

[brandondrury]

I ended up getting a Pintech E-Jam off of Ebay. I'm not happy with the Alesis Trigger|iO at all. By my standards it sounds terribly unnatural. In fact, I'm going to sell it and get ANYTHING else.

I've not had great luck with triggers either. Let me explain the problem. On a real drum you have full range of velocities at which you can strike the drum. Soft stuff, aggressive stuff, etc. It all sound "real". I'm finding that it takes a very smart brain to gate the signal (which is essentially what the threshold on these trigger gadgets does) but yet still be able to detect the necessary dynamic range to ensure a good performance.

So far I've not been happy with the dynamics. I'm hoping that getting a "nice" Roland brain fixes this.

As for triggering a real kit, again, it hasn't been sounding natural to me. You can tweak the DDrum stuff to sound good when someone is beating the hell out of the kit or to sound good when someone is playing soft, but I've not been able to achieve both.

I've been happiest with using KTDrumTriggers on the recorded wav files where I can custom tweak as needed. It takes about 15-30 minutes of work per song, but it is worth it in my opinion.

Brandon

[Cailyn]

Originally Posted by brandondrury

I ended up getting a Pintech E-Jam off of Ebay. I'm not happy with the Alesis USBPro kit at all. By my standards it sounds terribly unnatural. In fact, I'm going to sell it and get ANYTHING else.

How did you get a Alesis USB Pro kit? These haven't been released yet. They're coming out at the end of the month and I ordered the kit. I intend to use it as a midi controller for the kits in the Ableton Live Session Drum racks. They can be used as a midi controller or as a live electronic set. I really think it's the best of both worlds.

[brandondrury]

That came out wrong. I must have been rushing and my brain wondered. I'll have to edit my previous post.

I was referring to the USB Alesis Trigger|iO. It's been a terribly unnatural sounding box with my Pintech kit. Maybe it's a compatibility thing or something.

These haven't been released yet.

That's funny! They expected to have them out on June 8th. I had to wear a coat tonight to walk the dog. It's October!

Oh well. I'm glad I didn't wait for mine.

[bravojo]

Originally Posted by brandondrury

That came out wrong. I must have been rushing and my brain wondered. I'll have to edit my previous post.

I was referring to the USB Alesis Trigger|iO. It's been a terribly unnatural sounding box with my Pintech kit. Maybe it's a compatibility thing or something.

Trigger I/O does not produce sounds. It converts your midi to USB. Blame the software or the actual triggers. Try BFD or EZdrummer. The problem is defenitlry not the trigger I/O.

I plan on getting the USB Pro Drums soon. Then I can rock out quietly at home.

[brandondrury]

Trigger I/O does not produce sounds. It converts your midi to USB.

I'm well aware of this. It does however convert the electrical signals from the Pintech Ejam (a fairly high end electronic kit) into MIDI data. This conversion is always the unnatural part. The MIDI data that triggers my samples is the problem.

I've spent hour after hour playing with settings that allow fairly soft sensitivity that picks up ghost notes and such yet allows the drummer to really dig in when necessary. Such a setting is not in the Trigger I/0 - E-Jam combo. At least I've yet to find it. They offer 4 different velocity curves and all of them have turned out poorly.

I can set the Trigger I/O to be sensitive enough to pick up ghost notes and what I would call "normal" playing, but if the drummer hits hard I get double triggering. It's this way on all pads.

The Pintech triggers are rated quite well and considered to be vastly superior to the triggering of rubber pads and such.

So far using specific settings for loud parts and specific settings for soft parts has proved to be entirely unpractical.

It feels almost like the output signal from E-Jam is on a different logorithmic scale that that of the Trigger I/O is looking for.

Unfortunately, I see the Trigger I/O is sold with the E-Jam so maybe I've got a defective unit or something.

Try BFD or EZdrummer. The problem is defenitlry not the trigger I/O.

The problem is definitely the Trigger I/O and how it works with my Pintech E-Jam. It's possible that the type of triggers my E-Jam uses are not compatible with the Trigger I/0.

I have DFH Superior, Superior Drummer 2.0, and Steven Slate samples I use in Kontakt 2. I program with these often and I'm very comfortable with all three.

Brandon

[Cailyn]

I got my kit today so they are finally shipping these out. I'll get it set up, play with it for awhile, and then post my impressions. I intend to use it largely as a midi-controller for the Session Drums in Ableton Live.

[k-yo]

HI!

If you have any experience to share, I would be happy to hear.

Best,

k-yo
Finland

[Cailyn]

This is a nice set, as good as any in this price range. To do any better, as far as pads go, you have to move up to the higher end Roland stuff. The Surge cymbals are better than the rubber pad cymbals but they still don't feel like the real thing. They're heavy and play a bit heavy. Because this is a USB setup, you cannot plug them into a PA and go nor can you listen to them directly through headphones. Nevertheless, they work okay as a studio set.

The Trigger IO is another matter. It is plug-n-play but don't plan on plugging and playing. As Brandon mentioned above, getting the sensitivity set in a meaningful way is difficult to impossible. Either the settings are too sensitive and there are too many false triggers or not sensitive enough and all the ghost notes and fines detail is lost. The triggers tend to fire at 127 every time and I have yet to find a happy medium.

I've compromised and set things a bit sensitive. Then I go in and delete all notes with a velocity of less than 25. The result is then pretty much what I wanted in the first place but I do have to manually edit most of the velocities which is a bit tedious and draw in some of the ghost notes.

In fairness, this comes with BFD Lite which works quite well. I'm not using the set as a plug in but as a midi-controller for the samples in Session Drums and this may be where some of the problems are arising. Maybe I just need to spend more time with it.

It is doing what I want which is to play and record natural sounding drum patterns into my DAW.