The Traps E400 kit with the new module

It’s been just under a year since we last looked at the Traps Electronic kit but things have been afoot in the Traps camp and I recently had a look at their latest offering, which revolves around a brand new brain. The kit is still called the E400 but all new kits will come with the new module, called the E450, so check which one you are getting if you are in the market for a Traps kit.

If you want details of the pads, rack and cymbals, I suggest you look here, which will give you the low down on all that, as here I am planning just have a close look at the brain.

However, before we get onto that, I should bring your attention to a couple of small changes to the kit that have been made recently. The triggers now have ¼” jack outputs on them now (which makes them more compatible with others brains) and the hardware is now not by Bigdog but is specific for the Traps kit. Right, onto the brain…

The original brain for the Traps kit was a fairly utilitarian box that was designed in the UK with sounds provided by Bob Henrit, ex Kinks drummer and part of the brains behind the kit. Now, when it came out it wasn’t my favourite brain. Don’t get me wrong, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, it was just that it didn’t look very sexy, I found some of the voice descriptions to be very different from what I would have called them (the ‘jazz’ kit, for instance sounded to my ears very much like a big old rock kit) and the generally the brain just failed to hit the spot with me (though not for many other drummers as I know Traps have sold many, many kits). However, the ‘new’ brain instantly gets pretty much all of it right. It looks SO MUCH better; the sounds are good and are more accurately described, and it just acts much more ‘serious’ than its ‘adolescent’ relation.

The actual brain is more of a raked box with a reasonable two-line screen, large data dial, two volume sliders (main volume and auxiliary in), 17 buttons (all clearly labelled with no dual functions) and power switch on the front surface.  There is a headphone socket on the front edge and around the back we have all the connectors. The brain takes pads that approximate a five-piece set up i.e. kick, snare, three toms, ride, crash and hi hats. There is also a hi hat controller input, main out (left and right on separate quarter inch jack sockets) as well as auxiliary input (for your CD player/iPod/computer) and also, MIDI In and Out which definitely puts it up a league from the old brain.

The 17 buttons break down to 8 ‘mode’ buttons across the middle of the brain, 6 which control accompaniment, page, selecting and saving issues, and 3 that control the click on/off, recording start/stop and demo start/stop. Everything you need is clearly at hand and the actual operation of the brain has few surprises and I managed to get round it easily without referring to the manual.

As for what’s in the brain, there are 30 drum kits, which breaks down to 20 preset and 10 user, although the 10 user are filled with copies of some of the preset kits. There are 54 songs (50 preset, 4 user) and a total of 389 voices. This impressive amount breaks down to acoustic and electronic kicks, snares, and toms plus acoustic hi hats, cymbals and percussion. Now at this point, I should say that the voices (which are all samples) are actually rather good. There is nothing here that you haven’t heard before, but pretty much everything is useable and thankfully Traps have done away with the (almost) traditional helicopters, screams and car skidding noises that seam to infect most drum brains today. There is a Far Eastern influence in that there are quite a few (16 or over 4% of total sounds) gong samples which seams a little keen (unless of course one is a gong fetishist), and two of the song are ‘Jing Opera’ and ‘Chinese Rythm’ (their spelling not mine). However, this isn’t a problem, just an observation. The sounds themselves are well recorded and appear not to be particularly noisy, but I was only able to play the kit over headphones, rather than decent monitors, but it is definitely less noisy than the E400 brain, which can only be a good thing.

The Traps E450 module

When you want to assign a sound to a particular pad, life is made much easier by the ‘Pad Assign’ button. One press of this and then hit the pad and the brain will automatically scroll through all the sounds in the chosen voices (acoustic snares, electric kicks, cymbals etc) ever time the pad is hit. Good idea. Once you have chosen your sounds, you only have to hit the ‘Save’ button, choose a kit location to save into and hit the button again and it’s all done. Simple.

The songs are functional without being Grammy Award winning, and should they not be what you want, you can always plug in your iPod (or any other device) and play along with anything in your collection. The songs come provided with a drum track that can be easily removed by pushing the ‘Drum Off’ button, so you can play along without competition.

All the sounds can be edited for volume, pan and reverb amount (but no pitch changing is possible) but interestingly, pad use can be changed from just triggering a sound to triggering a song (start and stop) which is pretty hi tech for a ‘basic’ unit. Another clever thing is the fact that that any two of the voices can be stacked together to make composite sounds. Now, this is not something I would have expected in a brain at this price level, so it makes a pleasant surprise. It would have been slightly more useful if you could edit the pitches of the sounds as not all of the sounds will go together without a little pitch tweaking, but its still to be applauded.

The effects built into the brain cover the usual reverbs, which can be individually assigned to each drum or cymbal sound. However, while scrolling through the effects, I stumbled across ‘Delay’ that would appear to be tempo synced to the tempo of the current song. Now this really is something special, and I wish more manufacturers would do. If you want to do those Stewart Copeland hi hats effects, now you can.

On the subject of the reverb, the click sound always has reverb applied to it, which I found a little annoying, but the click sound can be chosen, from any of the internal voices. Strangely, you can change the pitch of the click sound. Why you can’t change the pitch of the drum sounds I don’t know, especially if the technology is already in there. Oh well.

Recording yourself is easy (much easier than some brains I could mention) and good for checking what you really sound like. The ‘Tap’ button is interesting in that you tap it 4 times and time difference between the last two presses sets the tempo, but then the selected song automatically starts at your chosen tempo. There is no way of turning this off, so if you are using the tap function to find the tempo in the middle of a gig, make sure you turn the accompaniment volume off first so the song doesn’t start.

Every pad has an assignable MIDI note which is useful for triggering other equipment (or PC/Mac) and it is possible to do MIDI data dumps (as Sysex) should you require it. Now, if that last sentence made no sense to you at all, don’t worry. It just means that you can connect the brain to other equipment and that the brain is rather well spec’ed. On a similar level, pads can be assigned to increment or decrement the current kit, so you can hit a pad and the kit sounds will change for the next one.

The triggering is taken care of in the Utility section and covers all the basic triggering requirements. The pad inputs are all mono, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people, though if you need more inputs, you can always buy a second brain, chain them together and assign different MIDI notes to all the inputs. The brain is capable of merging MIDI data at the MIDI in with that generated by the brain, which should save in MIDI merge boxes.

Right then, I think that’s it for what it does, how does it work in practice? As it happens, very well. The triggering seems smoother and more responsive than the previous brain and with a little tweaking of the pads, the response was fine in all areas except light playing towards the edge of the head where it tailed off a bit, but I feel that is down to the Traps triggers rather than the brain.

I’ve got to say that this brain is rather good. It’s a curious mix of facilities that you would expect in a mid spec brain (pad song, kit increment/decrement, MIDI spec, ease of recording) along with some curious omissions (most obviously pitch change). However, for a basic electronic kit, it’s really good and should last the beginner for a good long time. For the more experienced player, this would act as a good cheap trigger to MIDI interface, but I should point out that I wasn’t able to try it out with a selection of pads and triggers, so I don’t know how it would perform in ‘real world’ situations.

This brain really pulls the Traps kit up a level, and should make the kit even more desirable for new electronics users and those wanting a cheaper electronic kit. It has a few idiosyncrasies, but for the money and facilities, I don’t think anyone can argue.