OPTIONS APLENTY
Alesis have designed the Sample Rack to be a system that can grow with your needs as a drummer. It comes with ten kits preloaded onto the unit, but allows for more to be loaded from the SD card slot on the front panel. This I find a little annoying, as so many other devices are moving towards USB stick options, having to keep SD cards for this purpose seems a little antiquated, but, you can at least dump samples via USB to the SD cards so a separate card reading device isn’t needed. From the USB connection, you can run the Sample Rack as a drum interface for your DAW.
RACK AND ROLL
As a studio tool, the Sample Rack will integrate nicely with most existing setups. I’m not entirely sold on the 1RU rack format for a live performance purpose though. It could be better used if housed in a more compact sized case that could be mounted to your drum hardware. It’s this rack case format that makes it a little cumbersome and limited in how it can be set up. Getting into the sounds, there isn’t any real limit to the unit. The included drum kits give you plenty of space to play around with as a starting point. With the ability to drag and drop samples via the USB connection, you can get pretty much any sound you want on your drum kit. The Sample Rack allows up to eight triggers to be connected with two pedal inputs for the Hats and Kick as well. At the same time, a pad controller can be run into the device via MIDI, so no kit is actually required to trigger the sounds, so in this respect it works just as strongly as not just studio tool, but as a live performance unit as well.
BY ROB GEE
