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Looper's Delight
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I tried the Handsonic in the store for about a couple of hours or so, read the manual and thought I'd post a quick review. Now, since I dearly love the concept of the hand drum controller, my ulterior motive in writing this is that this review will act as a straw man that can be pulled down by people with more experience with the toy. My overall experience suggested that it was designed 'down' for easy accessibility and instant 'look Ma! I'm playing techno!' gratification, rather than trying to break new ground or really excite developed musicians. Designing down and breaking new ground aren't mutually exclusive processes but for some reason they rarely go hand in hand; they didn't this time either, for the most part. 1. Control surface Not being a drummer of any kind, I must confess that my experience with drum surfaces is very limited. I've screwed around with V-drums, and bang on a few pots and pans, but that's about it. This thing was really great! You could mute a pad with one hand, and still bang it with the other, press deep on it to get pitch bends, or otherwise change the shape of the sound. The 'feel' left something to be desired - it wasn't the nice open bouncy feel you get from a stretched drum head like a v-drum, but I think it would be hard to do what this thing does with one. 2. Sounds and fx. a. This is the unit's biggest let down. Was it just me, or did there seem to be more >melodic< instruments than drum sets? If I wanted to play the xylophone, I'd get a piano keyboard! The melodic instruments were less responsive to controller changes than for example the talking drums or tabla, and most of them were crap. What filler. The african talking drums (change the pitch with the light beam controller), tabla (mutable; play with your fingertips) and other ethnic instruments were very fun to play, but the dozens of electronic drum emulations and 'techno' patches, with synth stabs and other early 90s pablisms got old really, really fast. Sure, you could always add your own sound module, but that would involve tons of programming to get the sounds to play right, and also lugging around tons of crap to play it. I don't have the time, and for a grand, I'd want someone to do a halfway decent job for me already. The worst part was the fact that no serious programming had been put into creating new sounds just for this instrument. This is absolute sacrilege. There was no wavedrum emulation, no attempt to even go in the direction of new sounds. The pathetic attempt to do so in the form of 'industrial' and 'noise' sets were just crappy noise samples, with no use at all - they just make very noisy, unmelodic soundscapes. No one's going to hear >anything< in this box on a cd and say, 'that's that cool Handsonic sound.' Overall, the sounds had a 'sampled' quality, albeit they were pretty good. Played in the middle of a loud mix, no-one would know you weren't playing the instruments live, but play the same note twice in succession, in a quiet room and no-one will be fooled. b. The effects were likewise tame, nothing interesting or even very useful in shaping the sound.. No resonant filters, which the instrument was practically crying out for. What's up with that? I'm supposed to get excited over a reverse reverb? Hey! It's not the eighties any more! Since you only have a single stereo out, you can't add effects after the fact, except to the whole kit. 3. Programming and midi a. It really didn't seem all that programmable. You couldn't for example set up to samples to crossfade on one pad, or do other forms of patch engineering. All in all it seemed you were expected to use the patches as they were, perhaps mixing instruments up to make your own 'palette' and assigning the various controllers to them. b. The midi implementation, as far as I could see, was adequate. It had local off, which was my main concern, and 4. Performance use a. There's an excellent 'roll' feature, which allows continued holding of a pad to retrigger the pad, instead of working as a damper against further hits, but the button was hard to toggle while playing, and couldn't be assigned to specific pads only. Why didn't they allow this to be assigned to something like a foot pedal, or make it a bigger button? I got into some kick ass jungle and bhangra style grooves just banging on the pads with it on, but it wasn't set up in a logical intelligent way. b. The 'loop' section was a good step in the right direction, allowing you to create loops and then assign them to pads for triggering on the fly. However, the creation wasn't something you could do easily on the stage, more of a set up presets and then play over them kind of thing. Hey! I can already do that with a cd player... c. The knob controllers were a pain to use - they seemed more designed for tweaking patches, than on the fly performance. The ribbon controllers seem under utilized in the factory patches, and I didn't have time to program them. All in all, it was OK. I'm itching to get one, just because it's the only game in town and I need to learn to drum and to perform my own drum parts, but it's definitely marketed to the kiddy crowd, and I know it would proably be a waste, even though it >so< close to what would excite me, and many other users. bIz