fantastic percussion rig 
by boro from Canada, May 2007
Music Background:  Hobbyist

I had the itch to buy more and more hand percussion gear. I figured I would be saving money by buying an electronic hand percussion controller... and I ended up with my money's worth and then some.

For starters, the handsonic comes with plenty of high-quality samples on board. Congas, cajon, udus, bongos, drum kits, tabla, electronic sounds, etc etc etc. All these sounds are all tweakable using on board effects; pitch, reverb, delay, etc. are all available. The sound is fantastic. It's like having a truck full of percussion gear fit into a backpack.

To play these samples, you have 10 pressure/velocity sensitive areas on the circular pad which you can assign to your hearts content. Roland's presets are well thought out, and are great out of the box. The most impressive part of playing the handsonic is the ability to transmit midi messages between the various pads... e.g. you can perform mutes or pitch changes by applying pressure to the pads. There's even a D-beam that you can assign to control anything from simple triggering (like a chime gliss) to pitch changes (theremin anyone?). That's barely scratching the surface.

Some of the presets you will never use, and are obviously there to be edited and replaced by the user. The drum kit sounds are a little lacking, but the tweakability makes up for the lack of samples.

For keeping your chops up, roland added a rhythm coach function, which is like a metronome on steroids... it can play patterns, check your timing/accuracy/etc.

The chassis has foam rubber on the bottom, and sits reasonably well on a table, but this is quite counter-intuitive to playing. Roland sells a stand for the hpd10, which you may or may not think is expensive. Mine sits in a snare stand basket just fine, but the roland stand would obviously be best.

I don't know what else to tell you. If you're a hand percussionist in need of something to add to your arsenal, or you're a hobbyist looking for hundreds of instruments in one, you owe it to yourself to at least check the hpd out.

Click here to Read the inSync Review for the HandSonic 10

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