Tops and Flops This Week: E-Drums or Real Drums, Boss Plugins, YouTube Birthday
Heavy aoustics or artificial electronic kits?
1,7 / 5,0 | 
Tops and Flops This Week: E-Drums or Real Drums, Boss Plugins, YouTube Birthday · Source: Roland
E-Drums or real drums – it’s a long standing debate in the drumming community. One that I thought about a lot after a conversation at superbooth. Boss finally released plugin versions of some of their beloved pedals. And YouTube turned 20. My tops and flops this week!
This Week’s Highlights
E-Drums or Real Drums: Which one is right for me?
I’ve long been thinking this week about a conversation I had with our own Rob Puricelli, who I ran into at last week’s Superbooth. He told me about a new V-Drums kit from Roland he was testing and how good it sounded. To me, as both a lover of drums and of technology, the question of e-drums or real drums is a real tough one to answer.
In my band (shameless plug: Chaos Commute), I sing backing vocals and play the drums. And I’ve played e-drum kits on numerous occasions at trade fairs and friends’ rehearsal places. In most cases, there are two things I’m missing, compared to acoustic drums: the feel of hitting the drums (even more so the cymbals) and the sonic impact. That beautiful little sonic earthquake when hitting the floor tom or the bass drum just isn’t possible with e-drums – maybe with an amp, but that’s not the same.
On the other hand, every other instrument has been downsizing, making touring so much easier. And honestly, every time I tried to cram that giant hardware case or that 22″x20” bass drum into our van, I hate my drumming life a little more. But the only e-drums that offer a more realistic playing feel with mesh heads are those kits that, in total, are about the size and weight of an acoustic drum kit, when you include all the necessary hardware. Moving to an e-drum kit without the benefit of carrying less just does not make sense to me.
So the question is: is this the one musical area where I’ve become “back-to-the-roots” or “back-in-the-day-we-used-to” kind of guy? Like I said, I love technology. It’s amazing how much the world of amps and pedals has changed just in the last five years. Or with vocals. Or synths. But somehow, with drums, I just can’t get past myself. I’d love to hear from other (touring!) drummers in the comments: what’s your take on e-drums or real drums?
Boss Plugins: It’s Not A Good Start
I rarely dunk on new products, given these need to be tested and compared, since our niche of music instruments is also a comparably small one. But when one of the big players, arguably the biggest one in the world of guitar pedals, releases something in a way that seems significantly out of touch, something needs to be said.
This is what happened with the new Boss plugins, virtual VST versions of eight of their beloved pedals. Who in the guitar world wouldn’t want to have SD-1s or DS-1s in their DAW, and almost limitless amounts, too? But parent company Roland opted for a release in their Roland Cloud ecosystem. Which offers both a subscription model or perpetual licenses to plugin versions of many of their beloved synths like the TR-808 or the Juno-106.
But for some reason, they went for a subscription-only release for the Boss plugins. You can only use these if you buy the highest tier called Roland Cloud Ultimate. It seems to me that neither Roland nor Boss has been paying close attention to how things work in the plugin world. Otherwise, they’d have noticed the backlash companies like Waves or Minimal Audio faced when they went subscription-only. Let’s hope for more virtual boss pedals, but most importantly, for a perpetual license for these.
YouTube Turns 20: From Niche to Number One Video Streaming Service
Also, in other news than e-drums or real drums, or botched Boss plugins, YouTube turned 20 years this month. Ah, these first few years, especially from 2005 to 2008, were so magical. Given how quickly early YouTube grew, but how niche it still was, so much weird content was uploaded. And music played a vital role early on: “Evolution of Dance”, anyone?
Early music commentary, too. Before fan wars or social media campaigns, there was “Leave Britney alone”. While initially ridiculed, Chris Crocker could be said to be the start of the Free Britney movement that ultimately led to the pop star’s freedom from her father’s long-standing conservatorship. Also, music memes like “Hide yo kids, hide yo wife” were beginning to spread. Everything on YouTube seemed both weirder, but also more innocent in a way.
Music was always a driving force with YouTube, and still is to this day. While a few kids music videos like the relentlessly popular “Baby Shark Dance” are now part of the 30 most streamed videos on YouTube, more than half (16) are music videos. In Germany, music on YouTube has a special kind of history. Up until 2016, most music videos on YouTube were blocked for us, and we needed all kinds of VPN-related workarounds.
This was due to a legal dispute between YouTube and Germany’s biggest PRO (= performance rights organization) GEMA. Many Germans will remember that dreaded sign vividly. Today, YouTube is one of the most important platforms for all things music instruments, as there has been a significant shift from news-driven sites to influencers and gear channels (e-drums or real drums is a hot topic over there, I hear) in the last few years. Happy birthday, YouTube
More on this week’s highlights
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