he's good, and the roland sp20 is okay, but for your money DrumKat products are way better, unless you want/need onboard sounds (you don't). With the roland you pay more for less pads (8 instead of 10), way less control of their response and midi parameters of the unit--you a paying more for less control, you are just getting onboard sounds--check out the drumkat products if you are going for small portable pads.micah frank wrote:as mentioned above, i got this setup goin on. played out a few times with it and it's stable as hell and feels pretty natural once you get the hang of it:
http://www.youtube.com/user/kamoni
As for the aforementioned latency with Roland--it isn't the kit, it't your soundcard. I've played their mesh-head "stage" kit through an aardvard pci soundcard on a desktop, an echo layla soundcard on an HP laptop, and my RME multiface soundcard on my Toshiba, all with latencies set to under 4 ms (thats in + out of Live). To me this was totally acceptable and felt great to play. I really don't think the midi out of Roland heads introduces any latency from personal experience on three seperate soundcard/computer systems.
Also, I'm not a Roland fanboy, and I haven't tried the ddrum products (but know they are good), but Roland (and I think yamaha) have mesh heads that feel really good if you are coming from a drumkit--I guess that can't match tunable real skins on the ddrum, but it is a major step up from rubber pads.
fwiw, acoustic drum midi triggers can be good, but depending on the size of the room and the sound you are going for, and if you are looping, the acoustic sound layered on top of whatever you are triggering live may or may not be your bag. For recording drums as midi (or audio + midi) in the studio for later editing and tweaking, acoustic triggers can be great.
$.02