Edrum tracking versus Megadrum

[gkurtenbach]

I'm looking for some advice on deciding to switch from Megadrum to Edrumin.

Here's some context: I've had a Megadrum for about six years. As people on this forum have mentioned, it's very hard to get it setup. However, over the years I've tweaked the settings and severely simplified my kit to the point that it works acceptably. The Megadrum tracks the snare, 3 toms, kick, and two crashes. I used acoustic (Agean) low volume cymbals for the hats and ride. I treat everything as single zone, except the snare, which I sense head and rimshots.

I've never been completely happy with how the Megadrum tracks velocity. For example, it seems the best compromise is to set the maximum threshold so that it's pretty easy to hit a 127 velocity hit. It will recognize a larger dynamic range but that seems to make it harder to generate consistent velocities.

So my question, if you have switched from Megadrum to Edrumin do you think that Edrumin does a better job of tracking?

Thanks!

[Sly]

I had a megadrum many years ago. I can proudly say that I quickly understood that it was not for me. When i come to Roland td10, Megadrum was buried, in two minutes my DIY pads worked flawlessly. Now that I own a td-30 and an eDRUMin, I can say that edrumin is seriously competing with Roland best gear. And personnaly, I really think Edrumin works even better.
With all respect to Dmitri and the work he made, we can state that he was a pionner, he has opened a new road. And with all respect to Rob and his wonderfull work, I think Edrumin couldn't be what it is today without what megadrum was.
You unsertood that, for me, there's no competiton, eDRUMin is the new road to follow.

[Mylo]

I had a megadrum many years ago. I can proudly say that I quickly understood that it was not for me. When i come to Roland td10, Megadrum was buried, in two minutes my DIY pads worked flawlessly. Now that I own a td-30 and an eDRUMin, I can say that edrumin is seriously competing with Roland best gear. And personnaly, I really think Edrumin works even better.
With all respect to Dmitri and the work he made, we can state that he was a pionner, he has opened a new road. And with all respect to Rob and his wonderfull work, I think Edrumin couldn't be what it is today without what megadrum was.
You unsertood that, for me, there's no competiton, eDRUMin is the new road to follow.

I couldn’t agree more with these statements. MegaDrum gave me exactly wanted at the time. A trigger to MIDI interface to drive SD3. It worked well but took a lot of time to setup. Setting it up was MD’s biggest drawback IMO. Once I stumbled on to the eDRUMin and watched those videos I snatched one up. It took no time to make the switch after seeing it work. I ordered three more and never looked back.

I said it in another thread. Roland is talking about the eDRUMin in their meetings. I’d bet money on it.

Get an eDRUMin10 and release you kit’s full potential!

[perceval]

I haven't owned a Megadrum, but so many years ago, I had a unit called ED22.
There was no app for it. Just a small screen and pots on all inputs.

Then a Yamaha DTX700. There wer 3 presets curves for dynamics.

Edrumin has a bezier curve to adjust velocity. It is the most tweak able and user friendly approach I have seen. You can really dial in your own personal style of playing.

[gkurtenbach]

I had a megadrum many years ago. I can proudly say that I quickly understood that it was not for me. When i come to Roland td10, Megadrum was buried, in two minutes my DIY pads worked flawlessly. Now that I own a td-30 and an eDRUMin, I can say that edrumin is seriously competing with Roland best gear. And personnaly, I really think Edrumin works even better.
With all respect to Dmitri and the work he made, we can state that he was a pionner, he has opened a new road. And with all respect to Rob and his wonderfull work, I think Edrumin couldn't be what it is today without what megadrum was.
You unsertood that, for me, there's no competiton, eDRUMin is the new road to follow.

I couldn’t agree more with these statements. MegaDrum gave me exactly wanted at the time. A trigger to MIDI interface to drive SD3. It worked well but took a lot of time to setup. Setting it up was MD’s biggest drawback IMO. Once I stumbled on to the eDRUMin and watched those videos I snatched one up. It took no time to make the switch after seeing it work. I ordered three more and never looked back.

I said it in another thread. Roland is talking about the eDRUMin in their meetings. I’d bet money on it.

Get an eDRUMin10 and release you kit’s full potential!

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Yes, Dmitri was a pioneer and I'm forever grateful for that and his responsiveness. Actually, if it wasn't for the Megadrum manager app I would have given up on it.

When I saw Rob's original DSP trigger plugin, I thought it showed promise in thinking about doing the "drum brain" programming on the computer side of things. Of course, it wasn't practical for me to do a whole kit/hats using DSP Triggers, an audio interface and a DAW. So when edrumin4 came out I was thrilled to see that he had filled in the missing piece in a very polished cost-effective way. Then to follow up with the edrumin10 was super impressive. I hope he sells tons!

Appreciate your insights!

[dsteinschneider]

If you're a MegaDrum owner adding an E4 solves the issues that are most difficult to solve. Move your snare, 2/3 zone hi-hat and 3 zone ride to the E4.

[gkurtenbach]

Thanks to the encouragement of people on this thread, I got an edrumin 10!

I wanted to report back on my own original question of how it compares to megadrum. I was able to dial in better tracking and additional functionality with the e10. For example, I never got snare/rim/rimshot working to my satisfaction with megadrum, but now that works very well. Also, I use Alesis cymbals and was able to get edge/bow and mute working easily. I also use Alesis realpads for the the toms and e10 handles those easily even though they have a very weird piezo response. Scanning those just for 2 ms works fine even though there is a huge spike later in the pad waveform. I got the rims working too, although the pads themselves don't track rim hits all that well, so I just set the tom to mono, ignoring the rims. e10 works perfectly with my roland KT10. The velocity curves are easy to set up and I was able to get better sensitivity and control for all the pads/cymbals.

Some surprising things: getting rid of double triggers with megadrum required a ton of tweaking and guessing about what was going on. With the e10 there was no double triggering from the start! I literally had to force the e10's decay time to get any double triggers to happen at all!

So maybe I've just been practicing more lately, but I would swear that the e10's midi timing is more accurate and the velocity values are more accurate. For example, in recorded drum tracks my drumming sounds smoother.

So in summary, I think I'm tracking significantly better with the e10 and that makes it worth it!

[dsteinschneider]

Thanks to the encouragement of people on this thread, I got an edrumin 10!

I wanted to report back on my own original question of how it compares to megadrum. I was able to dial in better tracking and additional functionality with the e10. For example, I never got snare/rim/rimshot working to my satisfaction with megadrum, but now that works very well. Also, I use Alesis cymbals and was able to get edge/bow and mute working easily. I also use Alesis realpads for the the toms and e10 handles those easily even though they have a very weird piezo response. Scanning those just for 2 ms works fine even though there is a huge spike later in the pad waveform. I got the rims working too, although the pads themselves don't track rim hits all that well, so I just set the tom to mono, ignoring the rims. e10 works perfectly with my roland KT10. The velocity curves are easy to set up and I was able to get better sensitivity and control for all the pads/cymbals.

Some surprising things: getting rid of double triggers with megadrum required a ton of tweaking and guessing about what was going on. With the e10 there was no double triggering from the start! I literally had to force the e10's decay time to get any double triggers to happen at all!

So maybe I've just been practicing more lately, but I would swear that the e10's midi timing is more accurate and the velocity values are more accurate. For example, in recorded drum tracks my drumming sounds smoother.

So in summary, I think I'm tracking significantly better with the e10 and that makes it worth it!

Thanks for reporting back. I've also found the same experience. Even with all the beta updating almost 100 percent of my time on the kit is just practicing and playing.

[Polyphonics]

Sell the MD, buy an ED10.

I couldn't set up MD without constant help from forums whereas ED it was easy to get it playable and I've sought advice for perfecting rather than functioning.

One good thing about the MD journey though is that I learnt a lot about drums and a bit about electronics.

[gkurtenbach]

Yup, got an ED10!

One major weakness of the MD was that Dimitri didn't evolve the documentation over time, instead, relying on the forum to answer questions. Given that MD was tricky to program, this wasn't a good strategy. Dimitri was actually really responsive at helping people but, man, that must have been a lot of work. And it was sometimes really difficult to find the info you needed from the user forum.

Edrumin because it fundamentally works better, and has a better UI, avoids that pitfall. Hopefully, Rob can keep the good balance between good documentation and info on the forum.