E-drums...

[prochlea]

So i'm looking into e-drums, and i think i pretty much understand it - but I'm a little confused with something. If we did it, I'm trying to decide between a Roland module and doing something like addictive drums from a laptop triggered with the alesis trigger i/o. Obviously the roland module is easier to deal with, but from what i can tell, we'd get a better sound using laptop triggered sounds with a firewire output of some sort. Whats really confusing me is the software on the laptop. Addictive drums for instance seems pretty full featured with the outputs and routing and whatever, but they talk about using a host program like pro-tools or abelton, etc... Can someone give me an overview of how this works?

[daver2]

Pat,

As your "starter for ten" - my understanding is that some audio software is supplied as a "plug-in" module designed to run under a host program. So, if you have the host program, the plug-in is relatively cheap (or even free) depending upon the vendor. If you don't have the host software - but are enticed by the features of the plug-in - you have to go and spend your hard earned cash on the host program! A lot of "free software" you find on magazine disks (for instance) requires Ableton or some other program to be able to use them. That's the limit of my knowledge on this subject reached for what it's worth!

[prochlea]

Well - I found my answer... to those who are interested - At least with superior drummer 2.0, you can run their software without having to run a separate sequencer. Here's some info on it. I'm not sure about the other various software pieces - Addictive Drums, BFD, etc, but based on this I would imagine at least some of them have the ability to run stand alone.

[tedanderson]

My only concern with using a laptop as a tone generator is that laptops tend to crash and/or lock up when you least want them to. I wouldn't be too concerned if you used it as a soft-synth but when it comes to drums you want something a little more resilient. With the Roland box, if there is ever a problem, you can turn it off and back on in a matter of seconds.