Hey, I'm James from Better Music Canberra and this is Simon Ayton from Roland Sydney
and we're gonna talk about the TD4KP
show some the cooll stuff this thing can do Simon
No problems, yeah this is our little compact kit the TD4KP and it uses the TD4 sound engine
which was a very popular sound engine on the TD4 kit so now we've re-packaged it
into this tiny little kit
you can actually fold it down to a tiny little thing that you can put on your back
take your friends house and set up, so usually you know being a drummer
having the biggest instrument in the band everyone has to come to you but
now you can actually go to friends house set up the kit in the lounge room, plug it in to the sound system
How many kits does it come with?
It's got a whole bunch of kits in here
25 different drum kits but you can customize it to suit exactly what style of music you want to play
There about 130 sounds in there and I can mix some up, mix and match
and create my own kits.
Some of the kits that it comes with are things like hall kits, which are big rock kits
which are like...
When you hit the big time. Then you've got the tambourine on the crash cymbal. It's awesome.
So you can mix and match, so the tambourine on there, that could be actually a hi-hat as well
so I could actually put a hi-hat sound on there and play it with
my left foot as I open and close the hi-hat - pretty cool thing
It's got a great vintage kit that's just got that resonant bass drum
and it's really good for playing jazz
And you can choke the hi-hat as well, so you can...that sort of thing without having to use my foot
Or I can also choke the ride cymbal, the crash cymbal...
Now, can you tune these drums as well?
Yes you can. You've got a tune button here, so just hit that
and now, I've got the snare selected, I can just...
...That sort of thing..bass drum. So, whichever drum you hit, is now the focus of the tuning
So in a gig situation you can actually record yourself playing
like this, it has a little record function in here, I can do a little bit of a soundcheck
Snare...Play a bit of time
and then...
Play that, play that back...This becomes my soundcheck
so then I can tune the drums, get them to sound exactly how I want
I can't actually listen out the front of the PA system
usually the drummer doesn't get to hear how they sound in the room
the bass player can play along and you can hear how bad his timing is
and basically it allows you to hear how you're projecting yourself in the room
which is something that not many drummers have actually experienced before
Now, how could you connect this to your recording interface and software?
That's good question because even though it's a
small looking kit and it doesn't take up much of a footprint that all, people think
that that's basically where it stops - it's just a practice kit
but the reality is it has a MIDI interface which all of
our Roland instruments have because Roland actually invented MIDI
so it has a MIDI output on the side of it which is 'Musical Instrument Digital Interface'
and that allows us to connect it to a computer
and to record the notes that I'm playing, so not the sound but the notes into the computer
so then once it's in there I can use it to trigger programs like BFD and Superior Drummer
I can hook it up to Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, whatever it is and use it
as my recording interface. So, I can lay down a fantastic sounding drum part
and then substitute the sounds inside the software
with whatever sounds I want later
Now, for people who are just starting out playing drums, does it have a coaching feature at all?
IT has a metronome, but it also has a fully featured coaching function
so that allows you to do practice, warm-ups, routines but also tests your timing
and shows you whether you're playing in time with the metronome
it shows you on the screen when you're playing too fast or too slow
Thanks for watching. Simon, I've got one final question for you...What's with the high vis?
well I thought today we'd do something a little bit different
you never know where you might want to actually use your kit to practice, so...
we thought we'd actually come out to the warehouse and do something in the warehouse
So here we go!