'How To' Articles

How To Use Effects With The Roland TD-50 V-Drums

Effects used on drum sounds are great for bringing new life and impact to familiar tones.

Reverb, modulation, distortion and extreme EQ effects give the player the chance to radically alter the nature of a song that they’re playing. As a result, effects effectively put the listener in a totally unique environment.

Famous and memorable drum sounds with effects include The Beatles Tomorrow Never Knows (echo), The Police Walking On The Moon (delay), Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir (phaser) and Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight (gated room reverb sound).

Creating Impact With Effects

All of these famous effects can be easily recreated in the TD-50 with very little time and information.

Aside from the fact that creating kit effects can be a lot of fun, the process also teaches you and gives you a new found appreciation for the artist and the ‘art’ behind the music.

The Roland TD-50 features a room simulator, a studio quality reverb generator and three multi-effects units for achieving almost any effect imaginable

For enhanced impact, each trigger of the TD-50 has its own individual ‘Pad Effect’.

To make the audition and creation process easy, pad effects are adjustable in real time while playing.

This includes compression for manipulating dynamics or EQ for adjusting the frequency balance of each individual drum sound.

A fun tip is to record yourself playing using the Song Player section of the TD-50. You can then playback the recording in loop mode. This leaves your hands free while you experiment with the effects settings.

TD-50 Drum Room Simulation

To put the kit into a virtual space from small to huge, use the built-in TD-50 room simulator.

Many features are adjustable including size, shape, wall materials and microphone height.

By adjusting the microphone width, you can even change the image of the kit from mono to wide stereo.

Creating Extreme Effects

There are great time-based multi-effects in the TD-50. These include flangers, phasers, delays, reverbs and enhancers.

Each sound of the kit can be “sent” to these for enhancing or dramatically changing the overall kit sound.

To really boost creativity, any sound in a TD-50 kit patch can be ‘assigned’ to one of three MFX units using the ‘ASSIGN’ feature.

These possibilities allow you to put reverb to your cymbals and toms. You can then add a different effect such as a saturator to beef up your kick and perhaps overdrive on the snare for more aggression.