Korg Wavedrum WD-X review
By Rob Sandall
| Posted in Music Technology
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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.
)
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