Roland SPD-SX Review

A solid library of usable stock sounds, but the real power is importing your own WAV samples and loops over USB. With 4GB of storage and an intuitive kit structure, it stays flexible.

Under the hood there are three multi-effects engines, a solid library of included sounds, and 4GB of internal storage. The stock samples are usable, but the real reason to own an SPD-SX is the ability to import your own. You can load custom WAV samples from your library or somewhere like Splice, either straight over USB or through Roland's Wave Manager software.

Those imported samples don't have to be single instrument hits either. They can be full backing tracks. I like to process samples inside Cubase with plugins like Soundtoys before importing them, and it's great to be able to bring sounds like the Simmons Claptrap on the road. Programming kits is a simple process, and you get 100 of them to edit to your liking.

The pads feel great, closer to an Evans RealFeel practice pad than e-drum rubber, with even response and no hot spots. Latency is virtually nonexistent and crosstalk is a non-issue.

Let's talk about actually playing it. The SPD-SX feels fantastic. The best way I can describe it is that it's like playing a high-grade practice pad, like the RealFeel from Evans. Compared to the old SPD-S it knocks it out of the park. Do yourself a favor and check one out at your local music store to feel it for yourself. The pad surface is even with no hot spots, and triggering stays accurate even under complex layered kits.

It isn't perfectly ergonomic. The zones sit a little close together, so larger sticks and big two-handed parts take a slight adjustment and some practice to get comfortable. More niche companies like Alternate Mode build pads that are far more focused on playability and ergonomics, but they usually aren't user friendly and often need multiple pieces of hardware to function, so keep that in mind if you go looking.

Changing kits is as simple as pressing the plus or minus button on the front, and kits load fast. I haven't had any of the lag I used to fight on the SPD-S. You're not limited to those buttons either. I program the top left and right shoulder pads to jump straight to the kit I want, which works great and is very intuitive. I usually run a different sound configuration for every song in our setlist and name each kit after the song, so the pad doubles as a setlist for the whole show.

Crosstalk is the other big win. Some percussion pads will fire an adjacent pad accidentally when you hit one, which is a disaster if those pads are your start and stop triggers for playback. My SPD-SX has never had a crosstalk issue. The SPD-S I had before it was so bad that I performed surgery on it several times a year to minimize the problem before I finally cut my losses and upgraded.

Built rock-solid for the road, with buttons and encoders that hold up to touring abuse. The one known weak link is the motherboard or power button failure, which mine has.

Now the honest part. The SPD-SX has a known hardware issue, and mine has it. After an extended period of use, months to years, the power button can stop responding and the unit refuses to turn on. I remember getting ready for soundcheck somewhere in the states, plugging in my electronics rig, pressing the power button, and getting nothing. No indicator lights, no big welcome message I'm usually greeted with.

Our show leaned heavily on my ability to cue songs and various drum VST instruments to a laptop at side stage, so there really wasn't a way for us to play without it. After soundcheck I toyed with it and eventually got it to turn on, and these days it doesn't happen very often, but it still happens. When it does I just press the button repeatedly until it comes up, which has worked in every case so far, though it can take a few minutes.

This is my personal experience, not a guarantee that it will happen to you, but enough other drummers have reported the same failure that it's a fair concern for anyone considering the SPD-SX. It's most likely a motherboard problem and it is fixable. Aside from that, the SPD-SX is built for the road. The buttons and encoders are tactile and hold up to touring abuse. Roland, if you want to tell me what the underlying issue is, I'm more than happy to update this.

MIDI in and out, USB, two trigger inputs, footswitch, and four outputs (main plus sub). It plays nicely with DAWs and playback rigs, though it lacks hi-hat controller support.

The SPD-SX features two analog inputs, two main outputs, two sub outs, a 1/4" headphone output, MIDI in and out, USB MIDI, a 1/4" footswitch input, and two 1/4" TRS trigger inputs for additional pads. I run two extra Roland PD-85 pads off it, one to my left and one to my right, so I can reach the sampler sounds without leaning all the way over to the unit, which usually sits to my right above the floor tom.

I also fed a malletKAT MIDI controller into the SPD-SX, which then passed everything to a laptop running Ableton Live. The computer handled all the backing tracks and samples for the whole show. My rig was more elaborate than it needed to be. You'll be happy straight out of the box. I just had some specific needs that required a little more.

The pad plays very nicely with other Roland gear and integrates easily with other MIDI devices. The one real gap is that the SPD-SX does not support a hi-hat controller. The FD-8 will not function with it, so if you need a hi-hat pedal you're looking at a different unit with more limited functionality elsewhere.

It's also built to work with a DAW. Before we adopted backing tracks I used it the usual way through a DI box. Once we needed something that could reliably start and stop songs, the SPD-SX was perfect for it. In my setup two pads control stop and start of playback and two shoulder buttons move between songs. Assigning playable sounds to it gets risky in that configuration, since I could hit the stop trigger in the middle of a song, so I keep two trigger pads for extra sounds instead. It's overkill, but it's the most reliable rig I've found, and reliable is what matters live.

Still worth it for touring drummers: reliable, intuitive, and professional-grade after years of shows. The newer SPD-SX Pro now outperforms it across the board.

Why do so many drummers use the SPD-SX? Availability. Many touring and backline companies rent it for fly dates, so you don't always have to check a sampler as baggage when you pay for a flight. Roland makes that easy: save your samples to a USB stick and load them onto another SPD-SX, or if you run a laptop with Ableton it's as simple as plugging a USB cable into a freshly rented unit.

Compared to its predecessor the value is obvious. The SPD-S was notorious for painfully slow sample loading, sometimes hours to import files off the flash card. The SPD-SX is nearly instantaneous. For a touring drummer it has earned its price over years of reliable shows.

If a sampling pad sounds like a novelty to you, it isn't. You don't need an electronic snare sample in the second verse of a song, but I don't think you should restrict yourself from it either. Adding extra hits, claps, and percussion to a live set is genuinely more fun for me as a player and for the audience, and the SPD-SX is the pad that made that easy enough to actually do every night for years.

Should you buy this or the SPD-SX Pro?

Roland released the SPD-SX Pro after this, and I reviewed it separately. The short version: the Pro improves on the original everywhere it counts, and the most important change for me is that the front power button, the part that failed on my unit, is now a switch in the back where it can't fail the same way.

If you're spending money today and you want the most reliable, most capable sampling pad, get the Pro. The original still makes sense in two cases: you find a clean used unit at a real discount, or you only need a dependable pad to trigger samples and playback alongside a DAW and don't need the Pro's extra storage and I/O. In that narrower role, the original SPD-SX still holds up.

Verdict

The Roland SPD-SX remains a solid choice for drummers running a sampling pad alongside a DAW live. It was reliable for me night after night in clubs and theaters for years, the pads feel great, crosstalk is a non-issue, and the workflow is fast once it's set up.

The newer SPD-SX Pro has it beat on every front, so if you're buying new, buy the Pro. If you're buying the original used, and plenty of good ones are out there, test the power button several times and make sure every pad triggers correctly before you hand over any money. Buy it for what it is: a proven, backline-friendly workhorse that does one job extremely well.