The stupid irony about this is that, while I can play to a click track just fine (drum tracks, even), I still can't drum for beans (well, on a real trap set, at least). Something about the sticks, or what somebody said earlier about the feet... but I'll be the first to admit, in my case it's 100% because of the absence of practice on that particular instrument.

It's hard. Lots of physicality. It's too uncomfortably close to real work for me to ever want to do it. I'll stick to my little Trigger Finger pad, which I find to be pretty strenuous already.

Gotcha. I have my eyes on a Korg padKontrol for the very same reason.

...for the Rhytmically Challenged?

Yeah get one of thos padKontrols - let your fingers do the walking - I don't really need to grow impressive biceps on my age (and in that case I would go chop me some forest).

Software's all le_crud, a few nice sounds tho, but the thing itself is marvelous, and you'll want to find your own best MO with it anyway.

ORIGINAL: Roflcopter
Software's all le_crud, a few nice sounds tho, but the thing itself is marvelous, and you'll want to find your own best MO with it anyway.

Cool... there's some neat-looking demo material with it on YouTube. Curious... do you use the roll/flam mode, and the X-Y pad for rolls and flams?

The drum synth you choose will support rolls and flams in one way or another usually. BFD, the one I use, has like an 8th note roll that you can keep going by just banging on it every 8th note, and it has a flam as well. So you don't have to try to do a flam manually, which is kind of hard to do. If you get a good drum synth, you can do very realistic stuff. Cymbals are the most problematic, but if you listen to the cymbals on most pop/rock music anyway, they are so processed that they don't sound like real cymbals either.

Now that you mention it, I have noticed that in some of my drum libs (so far, SampleTank, but I will be delving into Jamstix soon). I'll look into that. I guess it's a matter of taste, density of MIDI notes, how the drum synth renders it, etc. Thanks!

Cool... there's some neat-looking demo material with it on YouTube. Curious... do you use the roll/flam mode, and the X-Y pad for rolls and flams?

Yeah and the rolls are different *because* of the 2 params, as with flam one direction controls how loud the 2nd note is, the other how fast it follows the 1st - and you can set it to *anything*, also with other synths, meaning you can do things *undoable* with a normal keyboard, and if it's a simple solo or whatever, you just program the pads to play those notes, or a simple progression, or chord.

So it's like a serious extension on stuff you already own, too - you want slide on your guitar, now you have it. And it's a serious DAW controller, seen some EQ control XY tricks I'm definitely going to try out. Real winner on all fronts.

Only minus besides the software was the lack of a PS, I didn't want yet another USB thingy anyhoo, so I got one and the midi cables too - I read that for real midi OUT you most *definitely* want those - not mentioned anywhere except on their forums, it really drove somebody bonkers already - you need the real thing, so best do that right away - USB throws a spanner there.

Excellent, Rofl. By "real MIDI OUT", could you tip me onto what is missing from the USB side? Is it just the fact that you aren't putting data out of a physical MIDI OUT port, or is there some kind of data missing from the USB side of the communication?

Excellent, Rofl. By "real MIDI OUT", could you tip me onto what is missing from the USB side? Is it just the fact that you aren't putting data out of a physical MIDI OUT port, or is there some kind of data missing from the USB side of the communication?

Here's the whole story:

http://www.korgforums.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=18007&sid=ab911f966dac69fc2ba2b132c1a7ad87

Even with trying to keep it under control, I've got 10 USB devices on this system. The keyboard has one, the Trigger Finger has one, the PODxt has one, I need one for the stupid Waves copy protection dongle, plus two mice and two keyboards and a couple other things. Generally you shouldn't have to use any real MIDI cables. I'd avoid any device that required that and get one that just purely works through the USB connection, since it's way faster and most devices already require it in order to run their own configuration software and it avoids yet another wall wart power plug.