Having pretty limited performance space in my studio, I was wondering if anyone has had much experience with the latest generation of the Roland Vdrums? I know you can't beat the real thing (pun intentional) but some of the samples available are really good. Thanks.

I have used them many a times on recordings, just not the cymbals.. The toms, kick, and snare sound great.. I then just use real cymbals .. I have done this live as well with good results.. see ya -Brad

As far as recording goes, I find everything except the toms to be totally worthless. But as a MIDI controller, it's great... I control a GigaStudio machine with my *good* drum samples. Just map out your samples by General MIDI and you're good to go. Even so, I still might overdub the hi-hat...

So are you saying most of the samples in the module don't cut it? The set I'm looking at is very expensive and I imagine the module is much of the cost. Wonder if I could just trigger the samples in SampleTank with a cheaper set?

I attended Montreal Drum Fest last year. Omar Akim has done a demonstration of the Roland V-Drum. He told us that he uses it exclusively for recording and live playing with Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. So you can take your own conclusion about the sound quality. It depends also of what style of music you want to use if for. Omar Akim is using its acoustic kit with its jazz band.

Having limited space like yourself I'm using the Roland V-drums to record midi only in to PT and then using good quality drum samples to record audio in to PT. If I'm going for convincing sounding acoustic drum tracks the Roland sounds don't cut it for me. I don't think it matters which brain you're using, the TD-6, TD-10, the new high-end one, etc. all use Roland's proprietary drum modeling technology. Ddrum brains, on the other hand, use compressed samples recorded from guys like Dennis Chambers and Simon Phillips. I haven't tried them but have heard that the Ddrum brains sound more like acoustic drums. But if you get some good sounding drum sample libraries like you can use those sounds with the V-drums. There's even a free drum library called ns-kit you can download from Douglas at . One of the drawbacks to this approach is the latency when the drummer is monitoring the samples while playing. It drives most drummers up the wall so I usually have them monitor the sounds from the Roland brain and just record the midi. Then I have to go back and record the drums from the sampler later. The problem is that sometimes the samples don't react the same way that the sounds in the module did so I have to tweak the midi or the sampler to make it right. It's kind of a pain and most of the time has me really longing for the real deal. But if the drum performance needs some help it's a lot easier to tweak the midi than the audio, so that's a big plus. I think the suggestion about looking in to a less expensive Roland V-drum kit and buying some drum sample libraries is a very good idea. You might even look in to pads as you get a LOT more for your money and most drummers find them to be as good as the Roland pads at a fraction of the price. I've also seen guys getting rid of their TD-10 brains and buying a TD-6 and a drum library or two. I'm using a TD-6 and there is nothing wrong with it at all for triggering and recording midi. To hear directly from a lot of edrum users check out the forum . Good luck!