Roland VAD503 V-Drums Acoustic Design Electronic Drum Kit

I’ve had the kit for a few days now - Bax were way better in price than anyone else and their additional Black Friday discount made the deal too good to turn down. They also managed to get the kit to me from the Netherlands to near the England/Scotland border in 3 days-impressive!

Overall impression is that the build quality is very solid. The kit shipped in 3 very large boxes that weighed a ton and the kit takes some setting up. The included hardware is heavy but looks reliable, and the 4 shells are all weighty.

Triggering from the snare, kick and floor Tom seems really good. The digital snare is a dream out of the box- I haven’t done any fine tuning yet. The mounted Tom was a bit disappointing. For all its heft, it looks like it has one rim trigger only, whereas the floor Tom has 3 and I’m pretty sure the opposition (ATV Artist Series) have 3 cones on their small Tom.

The supplied cymbals are ok. I currently prefer the 14” crash to the 18” digital ride, which has disappointed me a bit, though I haven’t messed with the parameters yet. I suspect that tweaking the overhead position may improve things.

The playing experience is very nice. I previously had a converted acoustic kit with a13” snare, so wasn’t using a traditional electronic setup. I don’t know if it’s the larger snare, but I’m still finding the Roland kit more natural to play, by which I mean I move around it largely as I would an acoustic kit. As it’s so solid, you can really vary the dynamics from pianissimo to playing hard.

It’s early days in the module, but it’s looking good so far. As usual with Roland modules, there’s about only about 4 onboard kits that are useable for the mainstream drummer, the rest being gimmicky or a bit “niche”. I replaced a Td-17 with the Td-27 and it’s a marked improvement, with better modelling possibilities and the stock kits have more presence and depth of tone to my ears. I would mention that until recently I owned a Mimic Pro, so my expectations are coloured by the VST sound quality of that. The Roland module isn’t in that league, but with careful editing, layering of samples or maybe a V Expressions pack, I’m hopeful I’ll be using onboard sounds and not using the module to trigger VSTs, as was the case with the Td-17.

On a minor point, it’s good there’s a “set list” function so you can choose the kits you need from the 50-odd stock kits and don’t have to scroll through the all. I also like the “snapshot” function when editing kits whereby you can do a “before and after” comparison - useful.

So, overall, I’m pretty happy and looking forward to exploring the potential of this kit. I should mention that Bax included a free EU to UK power adapter- nice touch.