Alesis DM5 Pro

[ApolloSpeed]

Hey guys, I'm gonna buy a electronic drumkit soon with my tax return.....it's nice to be able to turn DOWN the volume on drums for once at practice! haha or use the Tom pads for recording so triggering drumagog is MUCH easier than all that editing!

Anyways, anyone have or tried the DM5pro from Alesis?? Its only $600 at MF.com. Just in my price range!
And it looks like the trigger pads are not the crappy plain ole black rubber either.

What do you guys think?

 

[broken81]

Our drummer just ordered this exact kit. It's been like 3-4 weeks and he is still waiting for them to ship the dm5 brain. Not sure if it was back ordered or a huge mix up but he has the kit already. As soon as he gets the brain were gonna try some recording and live jamming for fun. I should be able to let you know about it soon though.

 

[ApolloSpeed]

you get it through Musiciansfriend?

 

[guitarguru1969]

Our drummer uses the Roland V-Drums kit for rehearsal, the older rubber padded one. He just upgraded the brain to the Alesis DM-5 and I like the difference. The sounds seem more realistic, less plastic if you will, no pun intended. We also went to the local Guitar Center and tried the newer Roland TD20S and oh my god I want to sell my car so he can get a set of those! I think you will be happy with the Alesis kit.

 

[Where She Wept]

I have a DM5 and as far as i know the DM5 pro is the same except you can load custom samples.

 

[KeithRT99]

Hey guys, I'm gonna buy a electronic drumkit soon with my tax return.....it's nice to be able to turn DOWN the volume on drums for once at practice! haha or use the Tom pads for recording so triggering drumagog is MUCH easier than all that editing!

Anyways, anyone have or tried the DM5pro from Alesis?? Its only $600 at MF.com. Just in my price range!
And it looks like the trigger pads are not the crappy plain ole black rubber either.

What do you guys think?

i tried it and didn't like it. it mis triggers alot, and the sounds are shitty - but that's a workable solution. It also looks/feels kinda cheap.

 

[broken81]

you get it through Musiciansfriend?

No he went through ebay.

 

[Torsis]

I’d rather have my crappy plain ole black rubber Roland dual zone pads, since they have never mis-triggered.
Never.

Didn’t try the Alesis pads, but I bought a couple of the cheap Pintech pads and they would mis-fire quite a bit – like 3-5% of the time.
That may not seem like much, but when the kick doesn’t register on a primary beat, or one of the snare hits drops out in the middle of a roll …well that gets real old, real quick.
Replaced them with Rolands.

Paid a little over $650 for these – bought it in pieces from Ebay:
4 PD-7 for toms
1 PD-9 for snare
1 PD-7 for hats (a cymbal moved around too much, even when tightened down)
1 PD-5 single zone for kick (mounted upside down and sideways so it’s vertical)
1 FD-7 hat controller
2 Visulite cymbals, 12” & 14” – the 14” has a choke bar/pad thingie
Roland TD-7 Brain
Roland cage – the curved one
Dual kick pedals
All the mounts & brackets + about 5 extras in case they break.

Add in $90 for the comfy Roc n Soc throne
…and another $25 for a 2x2 Midi-USB port

Cymbals are set up so soft hits trigger ride bells and hard hits trigger the crashes.
Zone-2 of the “rightmost floor tom” triggers a china
Zone-2 of the “leftmost rack tom” is a splash
Zone-2 of the 2 middle toms are different, but similar tom hits
Zone-2 of the snare is a rimshot
Zone-2 of the hat pad is an open hat – handy when the feet are on the dual kicks

Monitor from the internal brain samps, record to 1 MIDI track in Sonar, run a CAL script to split off to create separate MIDI tracks per drum, map to either BFD or EZDrummer.

Fun toy to dink around on, for the price of a decent guitar

 

[ApolloSpeed]

I’d rather have my crappy plain ole black rubber Roland dual zone pads, since they have never mis-triggered.
Never.

Didn’t try the Alesis pads, but I bought a couple of the cheap Pintech pads and they would mis-fire quite a bit – like 3-5% of the time.
That may not seem like much, but when the kick doesn’t register on a primary beat, or one of the snare hits drops out in the middle of a roll …well that gets real old, real quick.
Replaced them with Rolands.

Paid a little over $650 for these – bought it in pieces from Ebay:
4 PD-7 for toms
1 PD-9 for snare
1 PD-7 for hats (a cymbal moved around too much, even when tightened down)
1 PD-5 single zone for kick (mounted upside down and sideways so it’s vertical)
1 FD-7 hat controller
2 Visulite cymbals, 12” & 14” – the 14” has a choke bar/pad thingie
Roland TD-7 Brain
Roland cage – the curved one
Dual kick pedals
All the mounts & brackets + about 5 extras in case they break.

Add in $90 for the comfy Roc n Soc throne
…and another $25 for a 2x2 Midi-USB port

Cymbals are set up so soft hits trigger ride bells and hard hits trigger the crashes.
Zone-2 of the “rightmost floor tom” triggers a china
Zone-2 of the “leftmost rack tom” is a splash
Zone-2 of the 2 middle toms are different, but similar tom hits
Zone-2 of the snare is a rimshot
Zone-2 of the hat pad is an open hat – handy when the feet are on the dual kicks

Monitor from the internal brain samps, record to 1 MIDI track in Sonar, run a CAL script to split off to create separate MIDI tracks per drum, map to either BFD or EZDrummer.

Fun toy to dink around on, for the price of a decent guitar

You paid under $700 for all this stuff ??? Was it all used ? Good condition?

You think the plain dual zone Rolands are better than the Alesis White Mylar pads? And hows the TD-7 brain verses the DM5pro brain? And what about loading samples???Can either of these units do that??

 

[broken81]

The dm5 i think is the way to go cause when you play live you can just get some ddrum triggers and use the dm5 module and your real drums live. I know the dm5 is a good module and Ive worked with it but never used there kit. My drummer says its a pretty nice kit and feels nice but he has been playing it with no module though.

Just my thoughts and hopefully this week i will get to test with the module and I'm gonna try using dfh superior with the kit.

 

[Torsis]

You paid under $700 for all this stuff ??? Was it all used ? Good condition?

You think the plain dual zone Rolands are better than the Alesis White Mylar pads? And hows the TD-7 brain verses the DM5pro brain? And what about loading samples???Can either of these units do that??

All used and in good condition …meaning they work fine and aren’t falling apart.
It took me a pretty long time to get everything – I would lowball bid on a lot of stuff, and occasionally, I’d score at a very good price.

Example on eBay now (caveat emptor):
FD-7 hat controller for $10
a set of 3 PD-7’s for $75
another PD-7 for $10
another PD-7 for a dollar
a couple of PD-5’s for $6 each
5 pad clamps + all the tube connectors for $36
all the tubes for a cage 99 cents
That’s more than half of the stuff you need for about $150ish w/o shipping.

..or look at eBay # 140203406008 for $400
TD-7 brain
6xPD-7 duals
5 Pintech cymbals
Flip the cymbals if they suck.

The single zone Rolands are pretty hard and bouncy, and because of that, your hands will hurt a little after a while – more so if you’re a basher like me.
The dual pads have a little give to them, so they’re easier on your hands ..but you have pad & rim on them, so they’re automatically better.

Mesh heads are noticeably better as far as “drum head realism” goes.
As long as they trigger 99.999999% of the time, those are the way to go if you can get them for cheap …typically not the case.
See if they have the Alesis set at your local GC and just keep wacking the thing to see if it mis-fires anywhere on the head. If it always triggers, tell the guy you want THAT floor model pad for a discount.

TD-7 brain can’t load samps (don’t know about the DM5pro), but I just use the MIDI and replace them anyway.
A couple of the internal kits are pretty wet/processed, but they sound huge, so they’re plenty good enough for monitoring.

 

[ApolloSpeed]

I think I might get the dm5pro kit just for simplicity of having it all in one package....


but, say I wanna upgrade the snare trigger to a Roland Mesh pad or something like that, will that be a problem? Running a Roland or other product on an Alesis kit ??

 

[wishtheend]

Just to clarify, that's the standard DM5 module, not a DM Pro. No sample loading.

 

[Torsis]

...but, say I wanna upgrade the snare trigger to a Roland Mesh pad or something like that, will that be a problem? Running a Roland or other product on an Alesis kit ??

Yeah, any brand of trigger pad/cymbal is fine.
You can even make your own with about $5 in parts from Radio Shack.

 

[ApolloSpeed]

sweet....

I've looked on ebay for some of the stuff you said you bought.....WOW it is WAY higher than what you got it for:Smug: You musta got real lucky!

Also, curiously.....I was looking on ebay and saw this off brand kit called BORGI. It claims to have a Quantize Notes function! Does this mean it actually quantize your hits in real-time???? WOW that would be crazy. If that's true, I wonder if Alesis and/or Roland does the same.:Smokin:

 

[broken81]

Well my drummer got the dm5 module today. He brought that and 1 drum pad from the dm5 kit to practice. The heads are pretty cool they have a regular drum skin on it and you can replace them and stuff. Pretty neat stuff but anyway we used a regular ddrum trigger on his kick and ran that to the dm5. Then we used his drum pad for a bass drop sample. Actually it was just a sweet bass kick that we down tuned in the dm5. Within about 10 min we had the kick slaying and a sweet bass drop setup.

The dm5 module is sweet and has great samples on it. I also really like the drum pads also. I would definitely buy one personally if I had the money. I really think you will be happy with it if you decide to buy one.

 

[ApolloSpeed]

sweet....so it is a replaceable head, like the Roland mesh heads huh? Seem to not mis-trigger much?

 

[broken81]

yea you can also buy mesh heads for it too i guess. Dude within 10 minutes we had it rocking. But we were using his regular kick drum and a ddrum trig and just used the pad for the bass drop. We did however play around with making the pad a snare and stuff and it worked great and no mis-triggering at all. We did have to spend a few minutes setting up the sensitivity and stuff on the Dm5 module but a few tweaks and it worked perfect! I honestly thought it was gonna take more work to get setup but its very user friendly i think.

My drummer is going to bring the kit over maybe today and were gonna record and stuff so i can go into any more detail if there is any problems or give you some more info on the kit as a whole.

 

[mts1979]

I have one of those kits. I don't use it alot, mostly our drummer does, and I run it through DFHS. For the price, I really really like it. Plus, you can upgrade all the pads, so you are pretty much paying for the DM5 and the hardware, and its actually incredibly sturdy.

 

[ApolloSpeed]

I ordered it and got it in today!!!

The kit takes a while to put together and setup. Everything seems pretty study too.

It took probably a solid hour or two of messing around with the settings to make everything trigger good. The presets didn't seem right to me in how everything was triggering.

Once I got it tweaked...its pretty damn sweet! And LOTS of fun! And the wifey approves of the low noise factor

Only thing I will say is that I think I will definately look at upgrading the Snare trigger to a Roland 10" or 12" mesh. The Alesis is kinda small and I remember the roland demo triggered a little better......but overall, the Alesis is a nice kit. Especially for the price!!