I Don't Wanna Work

I just wanna bang on the drum all day.

So when I picked up my SP404, as seen in the previous blog entry, one of the first things I discovered was that despite all the hours I spent playing the drums on Rock Band back when I worked at Palm in '08-'09, my sense of rhythm was just a wee bit rusty. Perhaps very rusty. And there's really nothing quite like playing back a recording of yourself to really make that painfully obvious.

Now I didn't much fancy the idea of buying a set of plastic toy drums in order to fire up Clone Hero, and instead decided to buy a set of plastic drums... possibly to play Clone Hero, we'll see. But mostly to have a rhythm instrument that I could noodle on to build up my rhythm again.

I'd actually been mulling over the idea of getting a full electronic drum set since before I dove into the world of synths, but due to the fact that even electronic drums take up an awful lot of space and cost an awful lot of money, I never actually went through with that plan.

But as it would happen, multi-pads, such as the above pictured Roland SPD-SX Pro, exist. They don't give quite the same experience as an actual full on drum kit, obviously, but they trade that off for being much more compact and easy to live with.

What's interesting though is that it's only really been over the past few years that they've started to actually not completely suck ass. Previous versions of this product, as well as Alesis's similar multi-pad, have suffered from glacially slow load times when switching between kits, peculiar amounts of latency, kind of shitty samples, and just general jank. Thanks to this somewhat inauspicious start, they haven't really caught on much yet, and while the electronic drum sets have also previously suffered from the same issues with their sound modules, the more familiar formfactor has lead to them having a quicker uptake since that was resolved.

So after having noodled around on this for a little bit, I can say I'm really quite pleased with it. The sounds are good, the loading is quick, the responsiveness of the pads is really nice, and the compatibility with accessories is... well, that's something for a future blog post, isn't it?

In the meantime, I've got a lot of practice to do.