post by Mitchell Sigman (liker of the cars that go boom) You may remember the post a couple weeks back with Brent Hoover's review of Alesis' spiffy "real playing surface, but no crashy noise" Surge cymbals. Now the nice Alesis people have made some fizunky videos to show 'em off along with their new drum pads (with real tunable drums heads, though I'm not sure what tuning really affects in this case). It's pretty cool stuff, and the video teaches us that a suit jacket is the preferred muso drummer attire (as opposed to a war-torn Iron Maiden Powerslave jersey). [caption id="attachment_482" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="click for video 1 of 3"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_485" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="click for video 2 of 3 (these are a big hit with Thing from The Addams Family)"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_486" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="click for video 3 of 3"][/caption] Check out all the Alesis electronic drum madness on our site HERE.

post by Brent Hoover Over the last month I've been test driving some different drum set trigger kits. Having played drums for 28 years, it took a little getting used to, but one thing that wasn't strange were the Surge cymbals included with the Alesis USB Pro kit. They played and felt like real cymbals, because they were real cymbals. But they were different in two ways: for one, they acted like drum triggers (duh, or this would be a pretty stupid post), and secondly they barely made any noise when struck. The Surge cymbals have several holes drilled in them, plus brackety-type things on the bottom to keep them from killing your ears and prevent termination of your lease. Included were a hi-hat, a ride, and a crash and they felt great and responded well. Both the hi-hat and the ride are dual-zone for cymbal/bell, and the newest versions (which I didn’t get to try) have a “choke” control for grabbing the cymbal and stopping it- great for awesomely lame “Eye of the Tiger” rock punches! For a little comparison, I went and test drove some other kits that used rubber cymbal triggers. Results? Oh please... insert your own rubber-to-real comparison joke here (hey, this is a "family" blog!), but the rubber pads were truly “uninspiring”. So bottom line, without spending a lot of money (about $400 for the whole kit, around $100 for individual cymbals, about the same or cheaper than the cost of quality real cymbals) you can substantially upgrade the feel and playability of your trigger kit. If you're getting a new trigger kit, splurge for the Surge cymbals too, especially if you're used to playing real drums. And if you use your trigger kit as a practice kit, learning on the rubber triggers will give you an unpleasant shock when you discover how much more muscle it takes to move real silver/brass alloy slabs. Surge cymbals are a quick and cheap upgrade to take some of the “virtual” out of your playing. Check out all the Surge cymbals HERE (try not to hit your computer display with a drumstick).

Because the powers that be at audioMIDI have foolishly bestowed a public forum upon me, I shall take it upon myself to foist my musical endeavors upon others. Cutting right to the chase, my band Celebutante's music has been used all over the swell new Paris Hilton's My New BFF reality show, which is a kind of cool if you're into that kind of thing. They're about five shows into the season and have used almost every song from my record. I mean, I think they have very good taste... for those who don't want to tire their fingers clicking on things, my band sounds like The Faint and IAMX met up with The Cars and Gary Numan in a dark alley. And for the more gearheaded types out there, there's lots of vintage analog synths going on (synthesizers.com modular and Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, to be specific).