Good fairly inexpensive midi pad?

I am looking for a way to control midi sounds via some sort of pad I can hit with drum sticks. The best example I can think of is Neil Peart's drum kit, where he has some device that has a vibraphone shape to it. I don't know if it even has midi input/output, but I looked it up, and it was far too expensive.

It definitely does not need to have that many buttons though. I am just looking for something I can put on my set that I can quickly hit now and then to add a little bit of musical depth to my band's music. Like a quick chord by playing two simultaneously with a some weird tonal effect or something.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Used Roland spd-s pad?

Check out the Synesthesia Mandala. It's what Danny Carey the drummer from Tool uses. I have mine set up as a midi controller into Reason so I can use my own samples, or you can experiment with the big library of included sounds that comes with it. The great thing is that the Mandala is position sensitive so it knows exactly where you hit it and how hard and you can map different instruments or effects all over the surface. Inexpensive and very cool.

Does it have to have Midi support?

I have a setup that includes a Roland SPD-S. With this pad you can load sounds in WAV/AIF (not sure about midi) format onto a compact flash card up to 512mb and assign these to one of the 9 trigger pads of the unit. It would really depend on what samples you want to use? We have multiple samples throughout our live set which I used to hit the pads to trigger off.

I’ve recently altered the way in which I used mine however, I now have a headphone amp and a set of noise cancelling in ear headphones. The pad runs a click track into the headphone amp while another channel is run into the sound desk to deliver samples at the appropriate time.

Good all round piece of kit!

TheDividedDan said:

The pad runs a click track into the headphone amp while another channel is run into the sound desk to deliver samples at the appropriate time.

Good all round piece of kit!

Click to expand...

That's a clever idea. Are the sample still in stereo when the channels are split? I mean are there multiple stereo channel outputs, or do you need to split a single stereo channel into two mono ones?

If you just need a trigger pad, probably the best deal going is the Alesis PercPad, which has 4 pads and a foot trigger input, so you can send 5 midi notes. It also has 25 decent sounds of its own. Price is $99 at almost every dealer in the US.

If you need a self-contained pad that will trigger custom sounds, there are a few options, and it depends what your needs are.

On the low-budget end, Alesis just introduced a sample pad (similar to the PercPad) that accepts your files. Up to 14mb, but mono files only. I'm also not sure if it has presets, or if you just get 5 sounds, and have to manually assign them when you want a different set of sounds. Street price is $199, and the best deal going for simply triggering sounds.

Yamaha and Roland have multipads that import your samples (and also have several hundred internal sounds) but they're also priced in the $700+ range.

I'm in the process of replacing my sampler & Kat pad system with a single unit, and chose the new Roland SPD-SX. I haven't worked with it yet, but it specs out nicely for what I need, and is nice and compact with 9 pads and a few trigger/pedal inputs.

Bermuda

It really depends on what your goals are. If all you want is a basic pad with a few buttons to trigger sound files, I agree with Bermuda that the Alesis PercPad is the way to go. But if you want "a way to control midi sounds via some sort of pad I can hit with drum sticks", the key word being control, I can't recommend the Synesthesia Mandala highly enough. I can use mine to control effects live, open up filters, play multiple instruments, tweak the sound of those instruments, do chords, and lots more.