RE: My experiences with the Handsonic (long, reveiw)

["Paolo Valladolid" <phv40@hotmail.com>]

">
>oh, drat.  and there's no wayto upgrade the sounds I assume...
>

Nope. You could control an external sound module, but that kind of kills 
the
point of having all that stuff on board. From my own point of view, I'm
rather tired of 'lots of programming to get it to do what you want'
instruments.  If I want that, I can use reactor, which is what I'd probably
use the handsonic to control, latency and all."

I am mainly interested in using an external module for the 
microtunability.  
I have not been able to tune any of the internal sounds in steps smaller 
than 50 cents (a quarter-tone).  You can only program a 24-ET scale, which 
is severely limiting.

"It's pretty much a less than run-of-the-mill drum machine, with 
>excellent<
hand drum sounds, tied to an cool controller surface but with a something 
to
be desired UI and set up, and an unflexible architecture. It's still a lot
of fun, but don't expect to be excited by anything but the hand
drum/percussion emulations."

This is a fair assessment, which I agree with.  There are still a number 
of 
things which I need to investigate further, such as if _all_ the internal 
sounds are samples, or if some of them are physically modeled.  If the 
former, then conceivably, _any_ of the sounds can be set up to be 
controlled 
with muting, palm heel pressure, positional sensing, etc. and other 
techniques afforded by the V-Drum type triggering technology.  More 
significantly, can the V-Drum-type triggering be made to work with 
external 
MIDI sounds?  How about the D-Beam and ribbons?  If yes, that would be 
majorly cool in my book.  If not, I'm satisfied with the internal sounds 
that _are_ V-controllable.

Speaking of the hand percussion emulations, I must say I like the manual's 
little section on how to play like a conga drummer.  If sections were 
added 
to explain simple udu, talking drum, and tabla techniques (as played on 
Handsonic) that alone would make the manual a lot better.  Fortunately, I 
did have some tabla instruction...

Keep in mind all my comments have been posted without the benefit of 
having 
seen the Handsonic demo video, which I did order from Roland.

Bottom line is, YOU as the customer need to decide if the Handsonic is 
right 
for YOUR needs for the asking price.  The closest thing out there is the 
Zendrum and it is several hundred dollars more expensive without the 
V-drum 
technology (for muting, pressure sensitivity, etc.), the extra controllers 
(D-Beam, ribbons), built-in sounds, or sequencer.  I know for what I want 
to 
do, the answer was "yes".

Hopefully the posts on these threads have been of assistance.

Paolo

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.