Korg Wavedrum WD-X review
By Rob Sandall
| Posted in Music Technology
The Korg Wavedrum WD-X falls into the category of ‘electronic instrument that has to be incredibly good lest it be branded a novelty item’. Digital percussion – ironically since the 1980s – has come on in leaps and bounds, and the rise of modern virtuosos, fusion and electronica saw a number of innovative products released in the 1990s, including the first version of this.
Since 2004, however, when The Killers brought keyboards firmly back into the mainstream charts, many a band started casting a subtle gaze over the LEDs on offer. Now, particularly with anyone from Data Rock and Fenech Soler to La Roux and Friendly Fires pushing buttons with the public, manufacturers are seeing very good reason to give those favourites an airing once more.
So what actually is the Wavedrum WDX then? You’re effectively dealing with a tuneable drum head set into a stand-alone unit with multiple velocity points (including extra ones on the aluminium rim) which can be programmed to adjust depending on proximity to the edge of the pad and the movements involved – think a Mac Book trackpad for the sort of thing we’re talking about. Taking that idea further though, you can have one hand on the 10″ skin of the drum increasing pressure while the other taps out a rhythm. This means you can effect pitch and FX as if you had an expression pedal.
In terms of motion sensing, the Wavedrum pad can be used in conjunction with sticks, brushes, mallets and hands – anything else will work too, obviously – so you can tailor the sound to a much more contextual performance. This is no bad thing because, thanks to the gigantic array of drums, orchestral percussion, synth pads and traditional instruments, there are numerous ways to affect individual tones. So your djembe’s skin will tighten and therefore heighten the pitch when you apply pressure, and rubbing your brushes across the snare will cause the pad to imitate this sound as well.
Because the head has tension adjustment keys – you can use your own drum head of choice on the unit for familiar ease – depending on the instrument you’re imitating you can get it feeling a lot more realistic – timpani will bounce, snares will snap. More importantly, it means that when you’re working with faster rhythms you can give yourself the optimum surface to work with.
With 200 instruments to pick from – along with the ability to set up multiple ones in different velocity areas at once – reverb and delay effects and all manner of loops to play along to (all saveable), it’s fair to say that there’s a lot here to use either in practice or in a professional environment.
So is the Wavedrum WD-X a novelty? I’d say certainly not, though it is obviously niche. It can be played as a one-man-band in its own right, or otherwise I believe that it will be used for creating quick additions to songs – making use of sounds like timpani will, I rather suspect, appeal to the more dramatic performers out there. Also, as it’s a simple system to use, the average singer could play this at the same time as nailing beats too. Indeed, those into world music can certainly rejoice, as the Korg Wavedrum WD-X is arguably all they’ll need as long as they’re not worried about looking to ‘techy.’
Tags: electronic percussion, Korg Wavedrum, Wavedrum WDX
First you say “You’re effectively dealing with a single hard rubber synth pad”
then you say “The mesh head”
The wavedrum has neither hard rubber nor mesh head – the head is a real drum head (and you can swap in any branded drum head you want). The idea is to really give the feel of playing a drum, and this it does.
Andy B
You are, of course, undeniably right. I’d been A/B testing the Wavedrum’s head against rubber and mesh pads from various v-kits, and an amalgamation of one-too-many coffees and general excitement caused me to blow a fuse for a second there and write a touch of nonsense.
The blog has been amended following your spot, so thank you very much indeed.
Rob Sandall
I wonder if this is the last we will hear from Korg on the hybrid drum product line. As many know, the Wavedrum does not output in Midi format. There are technical reasons for this, as not every sound can be modeled and converted to a midi stream. However, the Wavedrum only has analog outputs according to the Korg site. No digital at any sample frequency. Internally, their DSP uses a 48 KHz sampling rate with a 24-bit word length. So why not let the user see the digital stream? This would make it far easier to record with. For those who already own the latest model, how severe is the hum and induced noise (from the environment) on the analog outputs?
Fat Abe
Actually to record the wavedrum presents its challenges but it’s by no means that different or difficult compared to mic’ing and recording more traditional percussion.
Using the line-out you’ll get a very clean signal, a lot cleaner regarding hiss than you would get from a mike/preamp chain, no worries.
It has two settings for the output level, if the playing is very dynamic use the lower one to ensure you’re not clipping at the wavedrum outputs.
Sometimes the acoustic ‘noise’ from playing the wavedrum adds a nice atmosphere and for some combos (wavedrum sound/playing techniques) you simply GOT to record that.
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PK
I just bought a Wavedrum. It totally rocks! But the Remo head came apart after just a few hours of moderate playing. Korg says this is normal. Come on–a $600 drum with a disposable toy drumhead?
Brawner