And then you may decide to sacrifice your third tom in favor of a second snare or a China cymbal. You have to teach the sensitivity settings not to ignore the good stuff that you spent your life practicing to play on your instrument of choice.Īnd then, since there are no rims, you have to program your pads so that your snare or snares get a rimshot as a second “layer” that you can summon with a harder hit. Perhaps due to the large number of cave-dwelling drummers who whack away at electronic pads with log-like sticks, like demolition workers with sledgehammers, the default sensitivity will simply miss the more intelligent parts of your brilliant, properly gripped, jazzy rolls and lightening fast rudiments.
One of the things I had to look at right away was adjusting the sensitivity. You can put these onto kits 99, 98, 97 etc., or overwrite any of the more silly kits and rename them, and then add these new personalized kits to your favorites list for easy summoning. There is enough to assemble and tweak at least two or three very nice sounding drum kits that you will not be embarrassed to gig with.
The massive sound library of things that are not in an acoustic drum kit? Just say, “Very nice, but no thank you”.Īssuming you bought recently, or updated the original firmware to version 2, (which you must do), you have a very small selection of nice acoustic snare drums, kick drums, hats, rides, crashes and toms. The entire, prominently featured, “Phrase-Loop” engine? Pretend it’s not there. The second thing you have to do when deciding to use a Roland SDP-30 Octapad as a complete yet compact drum kit, is ignore and overlook many of the features that you just paid good money for. The first thing you have to do when deciding to use a Roland SDP-30 Octapad as a complete yet compact drum kit, is to not care at all if the band says it does not look cool. Now most people who buy electronic drums today want them to be as enormous as acoustic drums, despite there being absolutely no function in such a design and layout, and so let’s just say, these drummers are not ready to go with a multipad, and let them walk laps around their sparkly fake shells, big mesh heads, rubber cymbals as big as brass cymbals, and giant knee-high kick triggers etc. And remember this little tray takes the place of your drums, cymbals, most of the hardware, and the module. I would describe the rebound, or stick-feel, as being similar to that of the center of the head on a 14 inch snare drum.
Even when you add the Roland FD-8 hat control pedal and a KD-7 reverse kick trigger and a kick pedal or the even smaller setup using the newer KT-10 kick trigger, plus a rubber floor mat in consideration of the neighbors, and a throne on which to sit, it takes up about as much floor footprint as two chairs.
The SPD-30, once the manual has been studied, and it has been thoughtfully set up, can be a decent little set of drums.įirstly, it is tiny. But I was able to realize that this was partly due to the default settings. I had tried out the Roland SPD-30 Octapad in the local Guitar Center on three occasions over the last six years and walked away unimpressed, and I sat at one at NAMM for quite a while, and it still left a lot to be desired. I also once had a similarly sized setup centered around a DrumKAT, (with a sound module added).
I was quite unproductive on that kit, but the newer SPD-30 has nicer pads and better onboard sounds. I had a mini kit based around the older SPD-20 with the exact same FD-8 and KD-7 foot triggers, eight years ago. I should mention at this point that I have tried it before. As real as any VST actually, with a great dynamic range. The silicone snare and three-zone ride cymbal were particularly wonderful using the default sounds in the module. I sold my Yamaha electronic drum set, built around a DTX-700 module, despite being very impressed at how real that sounded when playing jazz, and emulating acoustic drums, rims, bells, bows and all. I am now in a situation where having a big drum set around is not practical, and I needed to make a few compromises to get into a smaller footprint. Firstly it’s still the newest model, and secondly, I just bought one, for the following reason. Why would someone write a review of an SPD-30 now, when it came out in 2010? Good question.