Electronic Drums

This is really going to be a pseudo-review of the Alesis Strike MultiPad. I need to fold this into a larger context arc of electronic drums for this blog though. I’m a drummer. I’m a decent drummer who cares about kits and sounds and the way things feel. I have built a few acoustic kits at this point and even made some cymbals (not forged them or anything, but cut them on a lathe from other cymbal brass).

So in order to keep this post short I will say I grabbed the MultiPad trigger box hoping that I would have a compact all-in-one thing that would let me experiment a bunch by hanging some triggers off of a single box instead of my usual MIDI/laptop setup that involves a lot of cabling and configuration.

First thoughts are that it’s bigger than I expected it to be. That’s kind of ok as long as it’s going to be replacing a bunch of random other trigger pads and interfaces.(and hopefully a laptop). Second thing I immediately noticed was that the pads seem to be more of a giant MPC trigger pad. I think they are resistive pads and not piezos. I haven’t taken it apart to check but the vibe I get is that it’s a resistive element in there. You could play these things with your hands or fingers which is kind of cool, but they are too soft to bounce a drum stick on like a normal trigger pad. So rolls are kind of out unless you work pretty hard at hitting the pad enough to get a bounce from the stick.

Ok so one of the things that attracted me to this was that there were so many inputs. You get a high hat pedal input, kick trigger input and 4 additional foot switch inputs on two 1/4″ TRS plugs on the back. I noticed pretty quickly that the HH input is just a two-state open/closed input. It does sort of work with variable pedals but it maps to just open/closed in the software. I was a little disappointed by that. The kick trigger works as expected but the other inputs have a “variable” mode that doesn’t seem to do anything. So you can’t actually put an expression pedal on any of the inputs.

Browsing the presets it’s obvious that this device was not designed to be a drum brain but rather an adjunct to an existing kit. The presets have a range of loops and things mapped to the pads and sometimes melodic samples like xylophone or synth hits. It seems that the main use of the small pads at the top is to turn sample loops on and off. These small triggers don’t respond like I expected. they take a lot of force to trigger and hitting them with the edge of the stick like it seems like they were designed for doesn’t result in a very responsive trigger. This is a bummer because I envisioned mapping some of these to cymbals and hi-hats. they aren’t responsive enough for that in my opinion.

Let’s move on to the sound editing. I thought that there was a windows editor for this box but apparently that’s only for the Strike Pro drum kit. Selecting samples and building a custom kit is pretty tedious and the existing sample library is a little boring. I also noticed some noise when some of the FX sends are active. I’m going to look into this a little more but it’s a little unnerving that this unit would have noisy FX sends even when no FX is selected. I will go into the details of this some other time.

Ok, some good things. The pads can trigger in a round robin mode where an alternate sample is played every other time the pad is hit. Downside is that there are only two layers per pad. I didn’t think that this would be a big limitation but I’m finding that a device like this really needs to be able to support loading like 10 hits of a single drum in and randomizing playback. When it’s only two samples it’s boring. On the upside there are some interesting modes that allow you to pick which layer plays based on one of the footswitches.

More to come on this. I wonder if one of the clones of this thing are just as good or maybe better if they use a stiffer rubber pad. Something like an MPC 1000 that had drum pads on it is maybe what the ideal would be.