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We tried out the Roland HandSonics in our local music store and while the pads especially of the HandSonic 15 were pure joy, the sounds were pretty last century and most of them sounded like single samples with just volume controlled by the velocity, not multilayered, multisampled and randomized or otherwise made sounding alive.
It also looked extremely crappy and simply didn't make an attractive impression for 999.- Euro, as fun as the ribbon controllers and the infrared fields were...
The HandSonic 10 looked much nicer, but felt and sounded "cheaper".
We came to the conclusion that we would be fine in principle with just the pads since we have good samples already and so we checked out pad controllers. After reading this thread, it is funny that the guy in the shop explicitly recommended Akai for their especially good and responsive pads...
We took the MPD 18 home with us in the end and after some checking it out, I was pretty soon less than excited about the dynamic range. On the low end, it took too much velocity to trigger the pads (the soft response had been especially impressive with the HandSonics) and it created a kind of random hit-and-miss result if you wanted to play the full dynamic range.
At the same time, I would have liked to have a bigger range at the top as well, so when you really want to hit the pad hard, you would still get some difference in response...
We thought, well, it wasn't that expensive, you can't expect too much... - but we weren't really happy.
Some days later I thought I should search the internet, maybe there is some kind of firmware-hack to change the internal velocity response (using a velocity filter in Live didn't help a bit, since the incoming data was already bad, it only got worse), and so I stumbled over this thread, bought good tape today (Tesa extra Power Gewebeband 19mm) and applied two layers of tape on each pad (two layers are about 0.6 mm says my caliper).
Now it feels at least as responsive as the HandSonic and the dynamic range is just perfect. You can easily play rolls with two fingers on one pad. And although this shouldn't be changed by the mod, even the upper range feels better and more natural (but that may be an illusion, even if a nice one
).
So: Thank you very much hiphopdontstop and every user of those pads should really do the mod, it isn't just "improving" it a bit, it makes the difference between (almost) unusable and (almost) perfect.
And as far as Akai is concerned: get some tape guys!!!
Cheers, thanks and happy padding
Thomas Helzle
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