Alesis Strike MultiPad Review

Over 8,000 samples spanning acoustic, electronic, orchestral, and world sounds. The built-in kits are surprisingly usable, with acoustic drums good enough for a record and standout synth layers.

With more than 8,000 preloaded samples there are bound to be good ones, and there are a lot. Some of my favorites are actually the synths, especially the Pluck This! preset. The acoustic drum samples are the real surprise: they sound good enough that you could use them on a record and nobody would know they came off a sampling pad.

Good Ol' Rock is one of my go-to kits, the Cash Money kit is a clear nod to the Roland 808, and there are orchestral and world patches like timpani and Latin loops if you want them. One trick I like: on some kits the top right pad triggers a high-pass filter for an EDM-style build before a drop. You can map that to any pad on any kit, you just lose a sample slot on that pad.

The A and B sample function lets you assign two samples to one pad, either layered together or alternating, which is a nice standalone feature even if a DAW can take it further. With 30 preset kits and 70 empty user kits there's a lot of room to make it your own.

The nine pads are responsive and consistent, though not quite as dynamically smooth as the SPD-SX Pro. Latency is ultra-low when layering or looping, with only rare crosstalk on aggressive adjacent play.

The nine velocity-sensitive pads feel responsive and consistent. They are not quite as dynamically smooth as the SPD-SX Pro, but ghost notes and rolls trigger reliably and the rebound feels natural. Latency is effectively zero even when I am layering or looping multiple sounds. Crosstalk is generally strong, with only the occasional false hit when I play aggressively across adjacent pads at high tempo, which is rare but worth knowing.

The RGB lighting is more than a gimmick. Each of the nine pads lights on a hit, and the lights also track loop progress so you can see a loop running and how far through it is. In the nightmare scenario of a bad in-ear mix where you cannot hear the pad, you still have a visual of what it is doing. There are twenty colors and several animation modes per pad. The 4.3 inch color display is clear and large enough to show a lot without feeling cramped, and navigating menus on it is straightforward.

The looper is excellent. You can record and overdub up to sixteen measures, and you can loop external audio coming into the unit too, so a mic, keyboard, or guitar all work. It does not appear to quantize your playing to a grid the way Ableton would, so your timing has to be tight going in.

Solid, premium construction with a silicone rubber pad surface and RGB lighting that easily holds up to touring demands.

The build quality is excellent. The whole top panel is a silicone rubber surface that feels good under the sticks, and the unit feels solid and premium in a way the SamplePad Pro never did. It looks far better than its predecessor too.

More importantly, it takes a beating. Mine has held up traveling in and out of clubs and theaters without complaint, which is the only durability test that actually matters for a gigging pad.

Exceptional I/O: 32GB internal memory, USB and MIDI, five trigger inputs, foot and hi-hat control, and a built-in 2x2 audio interface. It works smoothly with DAWs, including the bundled Ableton Live Lite.

This is where the Strike MultiPad pulls ahead of everything else. It has 32GB of internal storage, the same as the SPD-SX Pro that costs hundreds more, plus an SD slot if you somehow fill it. Samples load over USB or a thumb drive. The back panel is the most complete I have seen on a pad: five trigger inputs (two dual-zone, one mono), a dedicated hi-hat input, two foot control inputs, MIDI in and out, USB to computer, and a stereo record input. It also works as a 2 in, 2 out audio interface.

The aux output is the part I lean on live. You can run a click to just your mixer, or send backing tracks out the aux while the pad's own sounds go through the main outs, and trim both with the knobs on the left (do not touch them after soundcheck unless you want an annoyed engineer). The one real I/O miss is the lack of a 3.5mm aux input for playing along to music, so you need an adapter, and the headphone jack lives on the front where the aux input arguably should have been.

I tested it with backing tracks in Ableton to see if it could run tracks without a separate interface. It can, but you are limited on how many outputs you can send to front of house, and I could not find a way to route Ableton's click to the pad's PHONES output. For my own rig I run a separate interface and use the Strike MultiPad purely as a MIDI controller, with Local Control set to OFF so no onboard sounds fire. It was recognized instantly in Ableton and I had all my control changes mapped in seconds, including switching songs across our setlist.

For around $700 you get flagship-level functionality and better I/O than the SPD-SX Pro, which runs $300 to $400 more. Still the best value multipad for gigging drummers today.

At around $700 you are getting flagship-level functionality and better I/O than the SPD-SX Pro, which runs $300 to $400 more. It is a real step up in price from the SamplePad Pro, but the sounds, build, and features make that gap easy to justify.

If your only goal is to use a pad as an Ableton MIDI controller and nothing else, you can honestly save the money and get the SamplePad Pro instead, since the Strike MultiPad is overkill in that one narrow case. For everyone else who actually uses the sounds, looper, and I/O, it is the best value multipad you can buy.

Verdict

Alesis stepped up years ago and the Strike MultiPad is still a winner for gigging drummers. It is high quality, robust, affordable next to the competition, and it does not let you down at shows. Had it existed when we started touring in 2014 I would have grabbed one in a heartbeat.

The interface can feel a little clunky and editing samples on the unit is slower than doing it in a DAW, but those are small prices for what you get. Against the SPD-SX Pro it is not really a question on value: the Strike MultiPad is the far better deal.