MIDI Drums/ Samplers : Help!

alo

Well-known member
Right.....

I have got a Roland SP- 404 Sampler that has a MIDI IN (no OUT) port at the back. I need to be able to trigger the sample pads using Electronic drums, except i only need 3 or 4 triggers as i'm in a band whose drummer has already got loads of stuff to deal with.

I wanted to buy a couple of Roland trigger pads (pd-8's i think) and use those but it transpires i need a whole kit, or at least something that can coalesce all the MIDI signals with a MIDI OUT function in order for the transferral of notes.
Any suggestions?
 

shaun L

Member
I haven't tried them so I dunno what they're like but there's a Korg 16 pad thing for around £140 (Korg padKontrol) and a similar set up on the M-Audio Trigger Finger for around £130.
 

hint

party record with a siren
shaun L said:
I haven't tried them so I dunno what they're like but there's a Korg 16 pad thing for around £140 (Korg padKontrol) and a similar set up on the M-Audio Trigger Finger for around £130.

The pads on these are for fingers, not drumsticks.

Alo:

Perhaps the quickest solution would be to bite the bullet and get something like the Roland SPD-S. Since it combines pads and a sampler, you could do away with the SP-404 altogether. It's not cheap though.

A slighty cheaper option would be to get a set of triggers to attach to your drummer's existing kit and something like The Roland TMC-6 to convert the trigger signals into MIDI for your sampler.

To go down this route, you'd need to either dedicate specific drums to the task of triggering samples, or put up with a mixture of the sound of the kit mixed with the output from the sampler (unless you have a dedicated sound engineer for gigs who knows when to switch off the kit mics and unmute the SP-404, that is).

Hope this helps.
 
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alo

Well-known member
Cheers both of you!

Hint; The TM6 roland MIDI converter sounds ideal. However could i not just buy normal PAD triggers and rig them up to the converter rather than the mixed sound ones? And do you know of any other converters? :confused:
 

hint

party record with a siren
alo said:
Cheers both of you!

Hint; The TM6 roland MIDI converter sounds ideal. However could i not just buy normal PAD triggers and rig them up to the converter rather than the mixed sound ones?

Yeah - I presume that this would work just fine.


And do you know of any other converters?

Yamaha made something called the DTS70. Looks like it has been discontinued, so you'll have to hunt for something 2nd hand.

There's newer Yamaha stuff too - DTXplorer, DTXpress III. These include onboard sounds, though, which pushes the price up, unfortunately. I must stress that I am only guessing that these will work for you, since I'm going by the logic that if they have a MIDI out, they must offer Trigger-to-MIDI conversion. The website doesn't confirm things!

The Roland TM6 and Yamaha DTS70 are dedicated converters, so they are safer bets if you struggle to find info on any other units.

There's the Alesis DM5, but that seems to be the most expensive of the lot.

Clavia used to make stuff under the name of DDrum, which included triggers and a sound module, which I would confidently guess also converts trigger signals to MIDI. This is probably expensive too.
 

dHarry

Well-known member
do you really need to trigger these with sticks/pads? you could probably do it with a cheap midi-only keyboard also.
 

hint

party record with a siren
Since Alo mentioned the drummer in the first post, I assumed that the drummer would need to be triggering the samples whilst drumming. Tricky to do this on a keyboard.

Plus, trigger pads would look cooler than poking at some little MIDI keyboard. Might as well use the buttons on the SP-404.
 
On the cheapo/2nd hand tip you might be able to find either of these:

Simmons MTM

Roland PM-16

these are both trig to MIDI convertors.

or else you could probably pick up an old SPD8 or SPD80 octapad for a couple of hundred quid. i used to have one, it was good.
 
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