combining spds and acoustic drums on stage......

[smaskame]

i'm looking for the best way to combine my roland spds sounds with acoustic sounds and to enable them to work in harmony when playing live.

are there certain frequencies at which each drum should be set in order for the two to flow seamlessly?

thanks in advance for your help!!

cheers.

sm

[Michael Render]

It all depends on what you are using the SPD-S for and how big a venue you are playing.

You need a way for you to hear the SPD-S and the audience to hear the SPD-S. With a big PA, that means running FOH and getting a monitor send. For small gigs, you might need an amp.

There are no specific frequencies, but like with acoustic drums, a kit should be tweaked so it sounds well together. If you are using the SPD-S for things like percussion, you won't have to worry too much. If you are trying to incoporate additional toms... well standard pitch rules apply.

So what do you think you will be doing with the SPD-S?

[smaskame]

spds uses...visuals??

hi, thanks!

i will be using my spds for a few things.....

firstly enabling me to have 2 seperate kick sounds and various snare sounds along with my live kit,

for some songs, playing the whole song using only the spds as a full kit,

and to trigger samples/beats prepared using synth/spds.

The type of venues we play in tend to have house pa's, and in rehearsal, we use our own pa, but ive never used spds live. yet!

Also, ive heard its possible to control visual animations using the spds to trigger individual visuals on a laptop, then played through a projector, all in time with samples??

i have a friend who has the visuals ready, i have the spds, but getting them to work together?

ideas very welcome!??

cheers!

sm.

[Guest]

I use an SPDS with an incredibly ghetto drumset, and so far i've gotten nothing but wonderful feedback. i use the SPDS for all kinds of things, from synth, to electronic drum sounds, to marimba, all sorts of stuff like that. It plays a big factor in my drum solo too. i have a PD-8 mounted by my hi hat and a couple of foot triggers too. the only setting i had to make was i turned up the threshold on the pd-8 to about 13 i think. if you want to hear them in action, here is my drum solo in the making (hence the poor drumming). i was just trying to figure out the layout of my solo, and so far i've ditched the vibes section and shortened the keyboard part.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNFmGTgPb3c

also if you want you can listen to my band, and hear all kinds of SPDS stuff in there

www.myspace.com/dynamicsystem

all in all, once you get it working properly you're going to LOVE it and you'll always be thinking of new ways to incorporate it into songs and stuff.

[Michael Render]

It sounds like you are in good shape. Just send your SPD-S back through the monitors and try to balance the levels between it and your kit.

As for visuals, I use Arkaos and trigger visuals by mapping them to the MIDI notes. This requires a computer and an expensive piece of software, but it works quite nicely.

Arkaos allows you to map both visuals and effects to notes, so you could have a world of fun. Your only limit is your only have 9 pads and two auxes to work with. That is only 11 MIDI notes.