Do you love your drum kit, but wish that it sounded different? Perhaps you wish that your bass drum could be darker, or your snare sharper? Maybe you just want a different sound for a specific song. Maybe you play Jazz covers, to pay the bills but rock out in a Metal band on Saturday nights and would ideally need two kits to get the job done.
Roland has the solution for you. The Roland TM-2 is a hybrid drumming module. What is a hybrid kit? Well, you can have your traditional acoustic kit, you can have a modern electric kit or, thanks to the use of triggers, you can have a mix of both – giving you the hybrid kit.
Triggers have come a long way in the past few years and drummers can confidently use them live knowing that they will track accurately and fast. Roland has been leading the way in the trigger market. The TM-2 is a great example of what can be done with triggers.
The TM-2 can take up to 4 triggers. A commonly used combination would be bass drum, snare drum and 2 toms.
USING THE TM-2
Once you’ve mounted the triggers, you can either run a mono cable or a stereo cable to the module. If you run a mono cable you’ll have the same sound triggered regardless of where you hit the drum. If you run a stereo cable, you can trigger two sounds from the drum. So you could say have a rim sound and a centre-skin sound.
The TM-2 has 100 banks built in. Each bank can be used as a full drum kit, or it can have sound effects, like explosions or claps. So just like a guitarist’s multi-effects unit, you can have a bank for each song in your set and cycle through them all, to ensure that you always have the best sounding kit for your genre and style.
The TM-2 has full drum sounds as well as “element” sounds.
DRUM SOUNDS
The patches of drum sounds in the library are “full” drum tones. So if you don’t like the sound of your bass drum, scroll through and find one more suitable. You can then use the two sounds together (mic your bass drum up and mix in the sampled sound) or you can use just the triggered sound.
ELEMENT SOUNDS
When you as a drummer go to record in studio you will listen to yourself as you play through your monitors. Then the engineer will mix the sound of your kit, adding in missing frequencies and mixing down others. The elements option of the TM-2 allows you to do the same thing live. You can tweak the sound of your existing drums to get a perfect live drum mix.
Using the banks you can save these sounds and build your own presets for different venues you might play on a regular basis.
OUTPUT
The TM-2 has a stereo out that you can run to a desk, as well as a head phone output for personal monitoring.
Also: the TM-2’s MIDI out is exceptionally useful for running a MIDI signal to pc for recording the MIDI portions of the drum parts.
OVERALL OPINION
The initial price outlay is R3995 for the module; R995 for the snare and tom triggers (each); and R1195 for the kick drum module. Most players will only use the kick and snare drum modules. This makes it a cheaper option than buying an electric kit. It’s also less cumbersome than making a traditional hybrid kit by combining an acoustic kit with an electric one.
The TM-2 is in my opinion one of the best investments a drummer can make. It allows you to dramatically change your tones while still retaining the kit you’re most comfortable playing. And, if you decide to buy a new kit one day, you can take your triggers and module to the new the new kit and keep rocking on.
If you would like more info on the TM-2, or if you would like to come into one of the stores to check one out, contact your closest branch.
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