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Aside from things I mention below under the "Sound" heading, I'm mostly quite happy with the SPD-S. It's the only electronic multipad that is is so compact, and the only one with a built-in sampler.
A few minor shortcomings: (1) You need a 512MB Compact Flash card (larger ones won't work; smaller ones are just silly and are even harder to find) and a computer with a Compact Flash slot to transfer your own samples into it. Fortunately 512MB cards and readers are really cheap. I got a SanDisk card and a Kingston universal memory card reader (USB-based) from Amazon; both work great. (2) The LCD screen is absurdly small. Having to keep patch names down to 8 characters gives me nostalgic flashbacks to the MS-DOS days, but not in a good way.
Quality:
No problems so far. I've had it for over a year, but haven't used it heavily. I heard a rumor somewhere that the problem with the pad contacts is fixed in recent units, but I can't vouch for anything.
Sound:
The sound fidelity seems good, although I haven't done any really critical listening or recording with it. The quality of the included samples and the ways it can manipulate them are a different matter. There are maybe 50-100 or so moderately useful preloaded sounds, depending on your style: basic acoustic and electric kicks, toms, cymbals, snares, and small percussion. (If you have a half-decent drum sample CD it probably has better sounds.) There are also a bunch of useless loops and sounds that were obviously included just to make flashy demos, like a guy saying "You got the groove!". I hoped that the included CD would have more useful sounds, but it seems to basically have the same sounds that are preloaded into memory, plus more loops.
And if you want to play the sounds EXPRESSIVELY, it will take some work. First you have to train yourself to hit the rather small pads, preferably near the middle where they're most responsive, and never too lightly, because they don't notice light hits at all. Fortunately you can select from a few different velocity curves, though you have to select one curve for all the flat pads and one for the edge pads. I settled on curve LOG1 for both the flat and edge pads, with sensitivity 5 and 7 respectively. I'm pretty happy with the feel now, although I really wish it would respond to light taps. (For external pads, you can set everything independently for each, including the minimum velocity that it will respond to-- this feature would have been really nice for the built-in pads. I'm very happy with the way my KD7 kick pad responds when plugged into the SPD-S.)
The other problem is that the sound generator is really wimpy in terms of sound manipulation. A really good percussion sound module would optionally (1) allow at least 8 different samples per pad depending on the velocity, and/or cross-fade between a few different samples; (2) vary the pitch depending on velocity; (3) have real envelope generators; (4) have per-voice filters. The SPD-S has almost none of those features. It can have two samples per pad, selected by velocity (no cross-fading), which is pretty weak. It can't change the pitch or even the duration of a sample dynamically, although you can do a bit with the effects (see below). It doesn't have any filtering for each voice, although once again you can fake it a bit using effects. There are no envelope generators except for a really basic "dynamic attack" feature that I've found pretty useful.
So basically, to make the sounds change in any way (besides volume and attack) in response to velocity, you have to use the built-in effects processor. Many of the effect parameters can be set to respond to velocity. The main problem with this is that there is only one effects processor, shared by all the pads that have effects enabled (fortunately you can select which pads' sounds are routed to the effects). So you can, for example, use a pitch-shift effect to make the pitch respond to velocity, but if you hit one pad and its sound is still playing when you hit another pad, the pitch of the first will suddenly change in response to the second. By far the most useful setup I've found is to use the "isolator" effect (really just a simple 3-band graphic equalizer) on just the toms, with the high band set to respond to velocity. The fact that the filter is shared by all the toms is not too noticeable. You could probably also get some nice results with the 4-band Parametric Equalizer, 2-Band Compressor, or a few other effects, although I haven't yet found settings on those that work for me.
It can play loops, but you can't set loop points or anything; it plays the sound from beginning to end and then starts over. It doesn't even loop seamlessly. I made a half-decent timpani roll sound that looped perfectly on my computer, but on the SPD-S there was a little click every time it got to the end. The loop feature is really meant for phrases, not continuous sounds.
There is NO WAY to get a realistic snare drum sound out of this thing.
Ease of use:
I haven't had any trouble learning to use it, but I have a couple of engineering degrees so maybe I'm not typical...
Overall:
My goal with buying the SPD-S was to put together a decent hybrid drum kit that I can roll around on the Boston subway system. I use an acoustic hi-hat, snare, and crash/ride cymbal; the SPD-S is my toms, kick drum (with KD7 pedal trigger), and other supplemental percussion. It works pretty well for this. I would NOT want to use the SPD-S for snare or cymbals.
The basic problems with the SPD-S are that it uses old technology, and that Roland cut too many corners on the sound generator. A new model is long overdue. Hopefully the next generation SPD will include: (1) much more responsive pads (difficult, but supposedly the HandSonics are much more sensitive, so apparently Roland knows how to do this); (2) a more powerful sampler, with envelopes, pitch manipulation, loop points, etc.; (3) a USB port so you can just plug it into any computer and transfer samples; (4) at least 2GB of built-in memory (Flash chips are so cheap these days that there's no excuse for having less) and a modern memory card slot.
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