Simmons Titan 90 electronic Drum Kit

[Hellfire]

Simmons Titan 90 Electronic Drum Kit:

This looks pretty good for Simmons. New module, Hi-Hat on a stand and it looks as if the snare now has position detection (Simmons calls it "Zone Intelligence"). The price is  $1,099.99.

Here are a couple videos:

Here's a link to the Simmons website: https://simmonsdrums.net/dp/titan-90
Here's a link to the manual: Simmons Titan 90 Owners Manual

[Hellfire]

Well, it's been almost two weeks since the new Titan 90 kit dropped. I'm not seeing very many youtube videos on this kit. I've only seen three youtubers that reviewed it. The one video was a Youtube short, so I guess that doesn't count.

I'm guessing Simmons didn't send out a lot of kits for review this time around or the other youtubers are waiting to put up a video at a later date. I don't know.

I've not had a chance to play the Titan 90, but to be honest all of the Titan kits play just fine. If you know what mesh heads feel like and rubber cymbal then you know.

The two main feature that caught my attention was the new single hi-hat cymbal/controller and the Zone Intelligence on the snare.

Hi-hat:
      Simmons finally has a three zone (yep 3 zone) hi-hat cymbal trigger that mounts to a stand. I know this is really important to a lot of acoustic drums that use edrums as a practice platform. I really like the fact that Simmons went with a single cymbal set-up for the hi-hat. I've always found that the two cymbal set-up on edrums suck. They are very noisy and never feel right. I don't know how well the magnetic controller works, but if Dave Simmons was involved (and he was) with it's design, I'm sure it will work quite well for the price point.

Snare Zone Intelligence:
      This is Simmons version of position detection (sort of). Looking over the manual it looks as if you can edit each of the four zones on the snare separately. From the manual:

ZONE EDIT
Zone Edit changes each zone of a drum. For example,
the snare has four zones: Center, Zone 2, Zone 3 and
Rimshot. Each of those can have a different sound, tuning,
damping and more.

I'm not sure if this is something that can be done with other modules that have position detection (I didn't think it was), but the fact that each of the zones can be edited is a very powerful feature. That is why I stated "sort of" for position detection. You can use it as position detection, but it can be any sound you want. And if you are using it with a DAW each zone has it's own MIDI note value!

The one thing that I saw that I didn't like it the amount of memory for importing your own samples... 

Let me first state that at the price point the fact that I can assign up to four unique sounds to a custom instrument is great! I like the idea of only 4, because 4 sounds/samples are easy to keep track of. Would it be nice to have 30 or 90 samples yes, but trying to put together a custom instrument within the modules UI would be a nightmare with that many samples. And lets be honest, most edrummers don't build their own custom instruments even when the module can do it (Alesis Strike comes to mind). The issue with the Simmons module is the 28 MB (yes I said MB or Megabytes) of storage. One good sounding custom instrument with four layers/samples can use up a good portion of that. You might be able to make three total custom instrument (if you are using all four layers). 

BTW, this is the same limitation that the SD1200/1250 module has for it's sample import. It's making me wonder if the electronics (the embedded processor) in the new Titan 90 is the same (or very similar) to the older SD1200/1250 modules???


To wrap up on my thoughts with this kit and the future, Simmons has now demonstrated they have the ability to put higher end features in a edrum kit. The only thing that is missing is the higher end module. That includes more triggers with Zone Intelligence and more memory for samples. The can make it. Heck the add-on cymbals that Simmons sells are great! They also have an add-on bass drum trigger that looks the part of higher end. They just need the module, the rack, and bigger drum triggers.