Another partnership? Seems to be the trend these days.
And if I was to guess, it's because none of these drum company have their own engineering department that can handle designing electronic drums. Remember the Pearl Epro live is just rebranded Alesis stuff. So, Pearl is doing the same thing as they did in 2010.
Looks like 2018 is going to be the year of E-Drums.
ATV also has new kits and Roland is announcing New V-Drum Kits May 8.
And all eyes will be on Roland's announcement.
The reason this is all happening so quickly is because of a few things: The release of the Simmons SD2000, Alesis Strike, Pearl Mimic from last year and the main Roland patent expiration for the mesh/cone detection system.
Each one of these products demonstrated things that were not common place in the industry up to the point they were released.
Simmons SD2000: A very affordable edrum kit with the cone/mesh standard (first for non Roland edrums in the USA) and the first color screen module. It also signaled the return of Simmons (i.e. Dave Simmons) to the industry.
Alesis Strike: A large affordable kit with much greater memory capacity than anything before it (short lived once Mimic is released), 8 individual outputs and one of the first color screen modules. Features to Price being the biggest break through for this kit.
Pearl Mimic: A VST in module form which has the advantage of having the largest memory capacity of any module to date and a large touch screen interface to boot.
These were all huge in the edrum industry which had sat unchanged for almost five plus years. Not only that, I believe the number of edrum kits sold have increased in the last five years while the sale of acoustic drums have decreased in the same time frame. I don't remember where I saw those numbers, but it did catch my eye when I saw it.
The flood gates are now open in the edrum industry and many will come rushing in to fill the void that Roland built with their patent walls. Innovation in a freed up market will go quickly. Just look at the first three offering of this new market above to see what I'm talking about. It went from first color screen to VST/touch screen in a box within about six months. Some things will work, others will not. This is going to be one heck of a ride.