SPD-SX Sampler pads

[sycle1]

Thinking of getting one of these SPD-SX units for playing back homemade samples, anyone using one that can give me the lowdown on them.
Michael Shack makes it look easy in his demo's.
Hoping that using samples will inspire me a bit.
I am in a bit of a writers Lull at the moment.

[sycle1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrEEP6_DAjc
Not a bad demo of it!

[Philo]

I have one. I'm glad I have one but I would have hoped for a bit more of a complete package given the price...

A few thoughts:

1. For playing back samples, it's great. For making loops etc... well it just doesn;t (you want the octapad for that).

2. The software interface is really bad. It does it's job but it could be so much nicer

3. The on device menus are decent, but there is a lot of jumping around when setting up a new "kit". It's not that much of an issue since you'll generally only do this once but again, a better software interface would help with this.

4. Locking samples to tempos doesn't really work. You can (with some setup), play back a sample at a different tempo to what was originally recorded but if you want to ensure something starts exactly on the beat then you're out of luck. This will affect you to different degrees depending upon your application, but there have been a few times where I'd hoped it would do a better job of keeping everything in time

5. The internal memory is decent. If you have lots of long samples, you won't get much on there (remember that it only deals with WAV files), but for short samples it's brilliant.

6. The effects are OK, but I barely use them (depends on the style of music you play I guess).

7. I've never had an issue with the responsiveness of the pads and I find the feel to be pretty much spot-on, but getting the top 3 to trigger if you don't get the angle right can be a bit awkward but a bit of playing around with what angles work for you will solve that).

On the whole I don't use it as much as I had wanted, but that's really my own fault. The pad comes into it's own when you create samples and use them in tracks. If, like me, you spend most of your time just playing along to other tracks then you don't get as much out of it.

[sycle1]

Thanks for your insight much appreciated.

[Kenster]

Not sure what your exact usage is but you can get an SPD-S to do most of what you're talking about (well, ALL of what you're talking about) for WAY CHEAPER. It's the previous model and there's still new ones out there. Just offering a way to save money for when the lull turns into , "hhmmm...I need more DRUMS!"

K ;-)

[Vectron]

You can do so much more and better, with ANY Multi-pad that has a USB output, or midi out (use a Midi to USB adaptor), connected to a laptop running Ableton Live. I totally agree that the SPD-SX is horrendously overpriced for what it does.

[sycle1]

Are there any comparisons out there between the Yamaha, Alesis and the SPDSX?

[Chris K]

"horrendously overpriced for what it does"

Typical of Roland Gear ;-)

[BDrums]

Been an SPD-S user for many years. It's an amazing product... but has it's user interface issues. I've been having issues consolidating samples / patches. I have some samples on different cards that I am trying to consolidate into the internal memory (or all on one card) so I can create patches using the samples from both CF cards. Is this something I need to do on my Mac, drag / drop the samples onto the destination CF card to bring all of these samples into the SPD-S? Even though Ive done the 'patch copy' and moved the card patches into 'internal patch slots', when I change the CF card, the newly copied patch name is there, but not the samples from the other card. Help! Sorry for hijacking this thread, but Vdrums members have always been great / helpful resources for many years.

BDrums

[Kenster]

You might want to check with DigitalDrummer magazine for comparisons.

K

[sycle1]

Thanks Kenster
Had a look, but can't find any Sample pad Comparisons on DD Mag.
From What I have watched on you tube in comparisons the Roland wins hands down just on the 2 Gig storage alone.
The Yamaha sounded lame and the Alesis just seemed dinky and nowhere near enough memory storage on either of them.
The Roland Comes with a Program for editing on the PC which is handy.
Hoping Santa brings the Roland.

[tivi]

Roland SPD-SX software is only for import/export wav files between PC and SPD-SX .. no editing wave

[Vectron]

Thanks Kenster
Had a look, but can't find any Sample pad Comparisons on DD Mag.
From What I have watched on you tube in comparisons the Roland wins hands down just on the 2 Gig storage alone.
The Yamaha sounded lame and the Alesis just seemed dinky and nowhere near enough memory storage on either of them.
The Roland Comes with a Program for editing on the PC which is handy.
Hoping Santa brings the Roland.

Ask Santa to throw in a few more bucks and get you a "2Box module".

[grog]

If you head to:

http://www.digitaldrummermag.com/BACK_ISSUES.html

and look for the November 2012 issue, you'll find my review of this unit compared to a lot of other multipads.

www.digitaldrummermag.com
www.dauphinehotel.com

[module]

I love my SPD-SX. I never liked the Roland Wave Manager utility.

I use Audacity (free from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to edit stereo WAV files and to check loop-points.

Importing the WAV files via USB drive is easy-enough. It takes two minutes to setup the playback parameters. 99% of the time I am only setting whether the sample is a loop or one-shot, I turn off dynamics so the sample always plays at the same volume, regardless of velocity of the pad-hit. I then set the mute-group to control if another pad will turn-off the sample.



The SPD-SX is great for playing home-made samples. It was even better once I gave up on the Roland Wave Manager utility.