A (somewhat biased) Review
Initial Thoughts
In my constant pursuit of new impressions concerning music and especially drums and percussion, I wanted to open up for some new ways of looking at things. Well, I‘m not a professional drummer but I consider myself a drummer at heart. At times, I hate playing drums – particularly when I feel like I have to do it only to please other people –, and then, I love it when I feel like I‘m on an adventurous journey, exploring the sounds and emotions drums can evoke in humans beings including myself. Naturally for me, the second state is what I‘m looking for to obtain. But most of the time, being a drummer is associated with hauling around lots of equipment, trying to be prepared for any imaginable situation in the rehearsal room (mostly), on stage (not so often) or at a studio (only if the gods want it to). For those who care, I consider myself a duct-tape guy now. Over time, I became weary of the constant struggle to always think of everything important concerning making music with a band. The reward, gained for being overly caring, mostly resulted in exclematory remarks of: „You‘re to loud!“, „Your playing is not tight enough!“, „You have a shitty sense of time!“, and – last but not least – „Dude, these two square meters of the stage are enough for your setup, aren’t they?“ (The answer to this more or less rethorical ment question is “no” – simply and always “no”!)
Where was I? Ah yes, in the pursuit of an adventurous journey: All these lamentations aside, being a drummer has more to it than simply hitting any objects nearby that are not so lucky to escape one‘s furious stick strokes of power. You also have to play musically, that is, you have to find the grooves and sound patterns that give the music you make – alone or in collaboration with fellow musicians – what it needs (not more, not less, some will say). Any bass player can agree with drummers that according to guitarists every song seems to need more guitar solos than they already have, and the drum track should consist of a subtle four-on-the-flour feel – in the world of guitarists a drum or bass guitar solo is just considered some kind of necessary evil If you don’t agree with this, here is a (more or less) direct quote of some recodring guy I witnessed: „Why do you want to record your bass track again? Nobody will hear it anyway!“
I‘m running off the topic again. So, in order to being able to gain musicality in drumming, I was searching for new equipment (yes, I know… but we drummers need that, really!), and luckily I found what I was looking for: A KORG Wavedrum Global Edition! And no, it‘s not another drum pad or a drum machine, but yes, it‘s a “dynamic percussion synthesizer”. At least that‘s what‘s printed on the rather old-school looking outer packing. So, while not being a MIDI instrument but rather a real drum, synthesizing (i.e., creating) an analog sound out of the interaction with it, this “thing” is really worth it to explore in manifold fashions. Being an enthusiast of technology (sometimes… better: most of the time this enthusiams is fueled by the sheer complexity of a technological device, and my initial, sole ability to anxiously dance around it, poke it gently, fearfully falling back and then, in the end, enthroning and displaying it to others, so everybody can see how intellectual and proud of its acquisition I am), I will try and understand this instrument as best as I can, so it will be a faithful mate for further musical endeavours to come.
(Inner) Workings
In this section I will focus on the technical specifications of this electronical instrument rather briefly. That means, I will not recite its analog-digital-converter chip number or its power supply requirements. No, I will concentrate on specifications that concern the Wavedrum‘s potential of being incorporated in the playing style and setup of a drummer – this is what I was missing while reading other reviews of this instrument. First of all, the Wavedrum is designed and build to handle analog input and output signals. Therefore, anything you play on it can be caught and amplified via two analog line output jacks (left and right), and/or you can plug in your headphones for listening what you are playing on it, when silence for the surrounding is required. You may also get a sound source to the drum via an AUX IN jack, enabling you as a player to jam to an external music player – or to listen to endless documentaries about alien lifeforms, the hows and whys of the world, and all its business, as I sometimes do.
Basically, you can connect the drum to the power grid (not directly to the huge one with the 200k+ voltage running through its wires – don’t blame me for any inconveniences resulting out of it if you dare to do so!), turn it on and explore the 200 factory designed drum sound and percussion patterns stored on the device. The drum can be played with hands, (wooden) drum sticks, mallets, brushes, toilet plungers, toothbrushes and so on (again, don’t blame me for any inconveniences… etc.). Any pyhsical contact with the drum will trigger the internal sound processor to make a tone according to the presets used, and the inner algorithm parameters provided. This shows a significant difference to MIDI based instruments. Simply put, MIDI based instruments listen for any events, made by analogue sensors (e.g. the pressing of a piano key), and create certain MIDI signals out of it, following a standardized MIDI protocoll (one value for a MIDI action (tone on, tone off…), one value for the note being played, and one value for the velocity of the note that needs to be played). For a MIDI based instrument to produce a sound it needs (huge) libraries of sounds that are triggered by the produced MIDI signal. That means: No MIDI library at hand, no sound is played. But, with playing MIDI sounds one can record any desired sound (e.g., the first cry of one‘s new born child, or the exasperated moan of a person, receiving yet another bill from a garage for repairing his/her car), stuff it into a MIDI library and play it on – say – an electronical piano.
The Wavedrum differs to some extent from MIDI instruments: Allthough it has four sensors that convert continous analog signals to discrete digital ones and back (i.e., converting sound waves to values digital values, describing those soundwaves, and transforming them back to sound waves), it does not trigger MIDI sound libraries. The sound processing inside the Wavedrum is done in another sophisticated way. Each stroke on the Wavedrum results in a sound, created by a specific algorithm, and can additionally trigger a PCM-Instrument sample [PCM = Pulse Code Modulation]. This characteristic of the Wavedrum has the effect that playing this instrument feels like playing a real drum (or a “bucket full of pelicans”, for example). If the player uses brushes and rubbs the surface of the head, this will result in the same sound, but being created by the Wavedrum’s internals. So imagine Keith Emerson – late member of the british progressive rock band “Emerson, Lake and Palmer” –, sitting inside the drum, and with every stroke (i.e., a command to make him synth the hell out of any given configuration the player has set the Wavedrum to sound) the UFO starts to gain momentum – a UFO, the player can build on his/her (man, gender-sensitive language is a bit “bulky”, so I will stick to the female form from now on) own or customize to her own needs for egocentricity – Eat that, you singers and guitarists (also the male ones) all over the world! One drawback of the Wavedrum, acting more as an amplifier than a MIDI trigger device, is that you might get feedback loops on stage (as the user manual explicitly warns against) if you don’t take care of setting the drum up properly (that is, not to close to any monitor boxes or microphones).
The Wavedrum – being a highly customizable instrument – can be altered quite freely when it comes to sound configuration. The triggering of any sound is realized by four sensors: Two drum head sensors (one beneath the raised cover on top, and one pressure sensor in the center of the drum head), and two rim sensors (one on the left, one on the right side of the rim). If the player strikes any area of the Wavedrum meant to be played (leave the front panel alone, I mean it!), the sensors take the input signals and the internal sound processing creates a sound (frankly, the quick start guide of the Wavedrum states a more elaborate sequence of signals for producing sounds but for the sake of simplicity I leave the discription here as naive as it is). For further coloring and additional effects, any created sound – either triggered by a strike on the head or the rim or on both simultaneously – can be accompanied by PCM-Instrument samples that the user may choose to go with the sound producing algorithm. And this is another major point in favor of the Wavedrum when comparing it to MIDI based drum instruments: The sounds produced on the Wavedrum can work together. A heavy hit on the drum head can trigger the rim too, producing interactive sounds from the head and the rim. And this is exactly why I prefered a real drum set over an electronic one until now. When you hit a tom on a real drum set, the sound waves produced set all other cymbals and toms nearby in motion. Being an indulgence to my hearing asthetics, this competes with a rather pragamatic approach of a sound engineer, whose solely aim is to get each instrument’s signal as clean as possible to her mixing rack, so she can edit it, and send it via public address to the audience or store it on a computer. Frankly, I doubt that any sound engineer is ever capable of sympathizing with me on this point, but I will just accept this small glitch of logic of the other parties world.
That being said, the wavedrum is a self-contained instrument, not depending on any sound libraries. A big advantage of this characteristic is that you can tweak and change existing presentations of either the factory preset sounds or of newly created ones. The Global Edition of the Wavedrum can store up to two-hundred customized sounds, leaving the factory set, “hard-coded” as a safe haven for any grossly defaced sounds a user may produce. One point of critic may be the fact that there are only twelve slots for quick access of comstomized or factory preset sounds available with the Wavedrum. Surely, one can navigate to other sounds with a quick turn of its “Value” knob, but time will tell if the number of quick accesses will suffice for handling any live settings (in my case: For those thirty-five minutes on average that are granted for the sake of mercy by the organizers of festivals to perform, the Wavedrums quick access slots will be absolutely enough).
Playabillity
The first strokes with sticks on the Wavedrum’s head feel a bit – well – strange. Due to the centered pressure sensor touching the drum head, the rebound is a bit weaker than I am used to. It feels more like hitting a floor tom. So, doing a single or double stroke roll requires a technique that uses more action of the wrists than the fingers (this in fact is a good opportunity for starting to practise sticking patterns on a pillow (yes, the comfy thing one usually rests her head on while sleeping) to gain a better technique and speed, like some drummers suggest). Besides that, sticking patterns on the Wavedrum need to be played with evenly strokes in loudness if one wants them to sound that way, otherwise some preset PCM instruments won’t trigger (gladly, one can adjust the level of sensibility of this and other triggers). The upside of these characteristics is that a Wavedrum player has to work on her playing to master this instrument. But in return she will also gain a more indepent “weaker” hand (mine is the left) if the drum is set to a place in the drum set where the strong hand cannot reach it for playing it as e.g. a ride cymbal substitute (heading towards open-handed playing style with the speed of light… or “sound”? Whatever!).
Frankly, one downer of the Wavedrum is that its sounds are so specific that one has to dig deeper into the preset sounds to find suitable colors that can be played to/in any songs. The synthesized real drum sounds (like the sound of snare drum, tabla, udu, frame drums …) may be fantastic for filling up some unused space in songs (for example, if a guitar’s strings “accidentally” broke and now the guitarist cannot play her minutely designed solo to please the audience – and mostly herself), but some sounds may only make sense in a pure drums and percussion combo or may act as a means of making some more intermission-style compositions like the factory preset sound named “Sneaky Pursuit”. But I think that if someone is used to playing the Wavedrum and can nearly “think” like it (rumor has it that there are some divine-like entities out there, actually capable of doing so – gosh, I wish the Wavedrum had an X-Files sound right now to emphasize my exaggerations here), there are enough sounds that can be used in all varieties of musical settings. Lacking experience on using the Wavedrum in a live setting right now, and how sensible this instrument is to feedbacks or too low/too high input signal levels, I will now “jump” to the conclusion section quicker than I’d like to. But rest assured (or maybe not… we’ll see) that I will add some more infos here regarding the playabillity of the Wavedrum in the future!
Conclusion
Being in fact a dynamic percussion synthesizer, the KORG Wavedrum Global Edition is a musical instrument that needs a different mental and musical approach than, say, for a MIDI-driven drum pad (set the latter up, and use it more like a computer interface to some standard/customized sound libraries). The pros are that this instrument is a self-contained device, meaning that it never needs to be updated or fed new drivers and other software, so it can work “better” afterwards (some of you may understand the term “updated to death” when speaking of a software update, being initially thought of as a means to fix things but rather then behaving the other way round… I feel with you!). You plug it in, connect your headphones or an active monitor to it, and off you go! This drum is also capable of creating sounds by simply touching it or running your finger tips over the drum head. So, it can be played rather softly with fingers, hands and brushes or used as a “loud” drum, integrated in an electronic or real drum set (yep, the one with all the shells and shiny hoops, and these fancy, vinyl-resembling brass disks that try to pierce your eardrums, everytime a not so forgiving operator of this hellish machine gives them a dreadful blow). So, if the computer’s operating system version number gazillion comes out, and your drum pads software is no longer supported, the Wavedrum can still be played, and their sounds be edited like on the day it was drawn out of the fiery forges of the KORG instrument plants – as long as you or the internet does not lose the user manual for this funky device. Frankly, the minimalistic interface with its knobs, buttons and its seven-segmented LED display may feel a bit old-fashioned but hey, the Apollo Guidance Computer’s user interface was also rather confusing, and it successfully helped people to fly a kerosene-fueled phallus to the moon and back (at least a small part of its tip).
I personally feel that the strict separation of PCM head and rim instruments is a bit harsh. Why preventing musicians from assigning head sounds to the rim and vice versa? Seeing it from the point of view that the Wavedrum is closer to a real instrument whose actually has a head and a rim and therefore logically the head sound like a head and the rim like a rim (try to change your real drum set’s tom head sound to its rim sound…), this design pattern totally makes sense (but here’s a funny fact: The PCM instrument “War Toms Head” is only available for being assigning to the rim and (you probably guessed it) the “War Toms Rim” instrument can only be chosen for the head – an explanation of this quirk goes beyond my rational powers).
Now being a fan of the Wavedrum, and refering to it as a drum and percussion synthie I absolutely love to play it alongside my real drums. The position within the set may not yet be finally determined (you know the deal… Up, Down, Left, Right, A, B, Select, Start…), but anyways, this instrument opened up my existing color palette with a huge amount of different sounds that can be integrated in any musical situation. Seeing it as an ingeniously designed and crafted instrument that has his own “character”, it is an absolutely inspiring device that I won’t miss anymore in my musical life. Finally I have to say that I will definitely test some MIDI-driven drum pads in the future because – depending on their design – their soundfiles can additionally be edited on a computer, plus some of them have support for foot pedals so you can trigger them with your feet while playing the drum set. But, being now on fire for electronic drumming stuff, I certainly will check out some of those MIDI-style beauties (but only if my bank account ever stops being sulky after purchaising the not so cheap Wavedrum).
So long!
PS: Dear guitarists! No, I don’t really dislike you or your part(s) you play in a song or a band. I just needed someone to bash on a little for my personal comfort, and to make the narrative a bit more enjoyable to read. But you have to admit that the ratio between guitar solos and drum solos in songs generally shows way more occurrences of the former ones – just some food for thought!