Hey everyone,

I own the xp-30 and I record some rock to alternative type music. The one thing I'm not totally pleased with are the drum and bass sounds on the xp-30. How much better is the expansion and is it worth the money?

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Chris Macedo

I have heard the expansion board and it sounds good to me. It has somewhere between 200 and 300 patches, (I forgot the exact number) and they are all excellent. The only trouble I see with it is it seems impractical to use multitimbrally (is that a word?) with the sequencer. Many of the drum sounds are specialized to one instrument eg snare. And in these patches only a few --like four-- of the keys are used and they are all variations on one snare sound. So in order to simulate a full drum set, you have to fill you rperformance almost halfway with individual drum sounds.

But whatever works for you--the board does sound great.

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There are rhythm sets you can use if you don't want such detail. If you don't need four samples of the same snare, you can use some of the rhythm sets. I like the fact that it can be as simple or complex as you desire. I just wish there were more ride cymbals. There is only 1 ride, with three different samples. I'd like another hihat as well, but there are plenty of kicks, snares, and toms.

The electric basses are good, with a few artifacts, string buzzes, slides, slaps, and other such things. the acoustic bass is quite good too. The fretless electrics sound good, but take experience to get them sounding authentic.

I wouldn't be able to do without it now thatI have it.

I have to say that the reason I bought my XP60 (with techno expansion) was because I found the drums and basses excellent. If the drums arn't to your taste you could always try editing the drum kits. I have found it very useful as you can adjust all the filters for each note and change the gain etc... I think there are alot of useful wave forms in the PR-B bank that alot of people seem to forget about. Try mucking around with the sounds to get what you want....for example....detuning the waves for each note can sometimes produce some wicked sounds so keep trying. The thing about these instruments is that the preset sounds are not always to everybodies taste so sometimes it neccasary to edit the patches (in anycase..then you get your own individual sound). Remember...the Xp30 is a synthesiser with editable parameters, if you don't want to edit then maybe you'd be better off with an out-of-the-box drum machine where you like the sounds but don't have the facility to edit them

I have the Bass & Drum expansion, and find there's a wide range of great bass sounds (made even better with velocity changes), but the drums, despite being excellent sound quality, are pretty limited.

For a start, there are only snares, toms, bass drums, cymbals & hi-hats - fair enough I suppose, it's a drum card, not a percussion card. But my main gripe is that I've only found a small number of them useful. Most of the snares have way to much ring (and there's only so much you can get rid of with the volume envelope), or they're extreme in some other useless way. Sounds like they've been mic'd close from the top, so there's no sound from underneath (that's right, no snare sound on the snare drums!).

I'm not a drummer, but I'm guessing they've been recorded to sound the way a drummer hears a kit at close range from above, rather than the way a muso or punter would hear a kit at a distance.

Anyway, I've found one snare I like, 2 bass drums, and a few toms & hi-hats (which ARE fantastic - first time I've heard a high-hat out of a synth that sounds like there's a real high-hat in the room).

I'm still tweaking, and I've managed to put a single kit together that works pretty well for me, with the standard persussion sounds, and I'm still working on a layer for the main snare. To be fair, it's already way better than the basic sounds, but it's annoying to have such a wide ringe of high quality useless sounds.

Hope this helps,
Hound Dog

You can hear some sounds of any Roland board at zzsounds.com. Just click on the "MP3 Audio Samples" at the top for each board. It appears that your Bass and Drums board has 21 samples to listen to. You can also print out the patch and waveform lists in the right column. I don't own the Bass board, but my Keyboards of the 60's and 70's board is awesome. Highly recommended for 70's rock and disco. Rhodes, Wurlitzers and Mellotrons shine.

Enjoy!

I also have the Bass & Drums exp board. I like the sounds very much - but I just wished it had more loops. Sometimes I just want to jam without losing my motivation with a bunch of programming.

I also have the 60 & 70's Keyboards, Piano, and Vintage Synth boards loaded in my XP-80. All are highly recommended.

gangster