Musicians have more choice than ever among the plethora of finger drumming pad controllers. Producer and educator Robert Mathijs offers this advice.
For me, pad sensitivity and responsiveness is everything. I hardly use any of the knobs or sliders or whatever else comes with the controller. I go for the pads and see if they respond well.
I test in two ways:
- Playing a beat on the pads gives an immediate “gut feeling” response on how the controller responds to different dynamics. This is the most important metric I use. I usually know within 20 seconds if a controller in its current setting works for me.
- Checking the response for soft hits is very important, so I usually test every pad individually by just using the weight of my hand (not my arm, but from the wrist) to drop a finger down on the pad. If it does not trigger, it’s not sensitive enough. By testing each pad individually, I also know if some pads respond differently from others. If that is the case, the controller is not great in my opinion.
Before judging too harshly, I do go into the settings of the controller and see which options I can tweak. Sometimes the sensitivity can be increased, or another curve will do the trick. So that’s my next step. Then I repeat the same tests. Playing and just the weight of my hand.
While playing, I make sure to play stuff with Moeller technique since that is the practical application of “just the weight of your hand” to hit the pads. If that keeps giving me a lot of missed notes, the controller is not good enough.
Finally, I play with my eyes closed, just to see if I can play 100% by listening and feeling.
Obviously the output is MIDI, so you can’t judge the controller by how awesome the drums sound. But there is a connection between what you’re playing and how the controller translates this to MIDI, which then translates to the sound. So, ideally, play with the kits you love when testing the controller. For that reason, I test them out at home. In a store, you don’t have your sounds and neither do you have the time to tweak the settings.
If you have the option of returning items you bought and getting your money back, this is a right you should put to use when selecting a MIDI pad controller. It may not be very nice for the store, but I have not found another way to really test a controller out properly. Your only workaround to this is waiting for me to test a controller and make a video about it, but then you could still get a faulty unit once in a while.
Check out Robert’s profile article in digitalDrummer here, and his reviews here.