Any 2Box users on here?

    I'm looking to purchase an electronic drum kit, and had pretty much settled on a Roland TD30. However, last night, the 2Box system appeared on my radar. The price seems a hell of a lot more appealing, and, from what I can gather, the sounds and feel are supposed to be closer to the real thing than the Roland kit, with less gimmicky, novelty sounds etc. I understand that the quality is a little less than Roland (But then it is under half the price) but the 2Box is still said to be fairly robust. Does anybody here have any first-hand experience of the 2Box? I shall probably have to buy "blind" as stockists seem few and far between.

    I have experience with both. The 2Box are FAR more realistic sounding...particularly the cymbals. The actual pads, however don't trigger as well (rimshots, hi-hat, etc.). It is capable of loading any drum libraries, and so the sample depth crushes Roland.

    You could always use a lappy in conjunction with a Rolly - the latter for accurate triggering and great zone options plus rims on all pads, and the former to host your VI of choice, most if not all of which offer Roland-mapping templates "out of the box", so to speak.


    Due to the fact that the lappy, in this case, is only serving as the "brain" for monitoring, the buffer settings can be reduced to an absolute minimum as you'd only be hosting 1 VI and nothing else. Once the MIDI data's in the lappy, you can transfer it to your main rig, but if you can echo it to your DAW whilst playing, it can be recorded there anyway.


    Obviously, if your lappy is your DAW, that issue's obsolete and all you'll have to be wary of is possibly rendering stems or the entire mix so you can disable processing and reduce overhead for that low-latency tracking of the drums.


    In short, I'd go for something like this setup, especially if you already have a lappy. The Roland pads are well proven, robust and super-quiet to hit too, which can be a huge bonus when you think about it.

    Hi Monkey Man. Thanks for the detailed response, although I have to be completely honest and say that an awful lot of that went straight over my head. I won't be doing any recording, or using a DAW. The only time a laptop will play a part is in getting the sound samples into the drum module. All I want is an electric kit that I can practise on, but it absolutely must feel authentic. Because I'm also considering maybe using it in a live situation if it sounds as good as I'm hoping. I have played a Roland before now, but, although it sounded great, it felt a bit "toy-ish". I guess it was a middle of the range kit, as it did have the mesh heads. Their higher end models that do resemble real kits, ie, the shells being a decent size, seem to be serious money, hence the interest in the 2Box kit :)

    The problem is that neither a complete roland or 2box kit is a perfect solution imo. The Roland Mesh Pads have a great playing feel and accurate triggering. However all the Roland modules including the TD-30 sound unacceptable if you once used software samplers. The 2Box Module is able to load your own multisamples and thus can replicate the sound quality you get from a software library. However, the 2box kit itself does not do that great module justice. It plays and looks very cheap and unstable.


    With my latest band project we converted a cheap acoustic drum kit into an EDrum by putting mesh heads and triggers on the shells. We also replaced the real cymbals with cymbal pads. At the moment we use an old roland module to trigger a PC running Superior Drumer 2. The sound is awesome and the kit also looks like a normal kit. The whole band sound benefitted so highly by this, it´s just unbelievable. The next step will be to replace the Roland module with the 2Box module and load the Metal Machinery SDX samples into the module. This will be our live setup then.