Do you own a real drum set, or have the inclination to purchase one? Then I would like to direct your attention to this: the first-ever Plastic Axe video review! In just a shade under nine minutes, I’ll show you the Omega GM-1 in action, walk you quickly through installation, and talk a bit about the benefits and drawbacks of such a powerful system.

Now, as you probably remember, the GM-1 is a $250 system that includes trigger sensors for a real drum set, which carry information to a central module, which then passes it on to either a Guitar Hero World Tour drum kit (via an included MIDI cable), or Mad Catz portable Rock Band kit (via an optional, $20 adapter).

In other words, it lets you play real drums in Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

Sound interesting? Then let’s begin.

Want to know more? I’ve posted some more thoughts and notes on the review after the break.

Oh, hi. Welcome to after the break. So anyway, in editing the video, there were some bits of rambling and editorializing that I had to cut for the sake of keeping it under YouTube’s 10-minute limit. (And let’s face it, even I don’t like hearing myself talk for more than 10 minutes.)

One thing I was very curious about when reading about the GM-1 was whether it could act as a true MIDI controller. The answer is: sort of. I hooked it up to my Mac via a USB-to-MIDI adapter, and discovered that it was definitely sending signals to GarageBand. But there were two problems: First, only the drum-head triggers appear to be velocity-sensitive; the cymbals are not. So you have these fairly normal-volume drum hits punctuated by enormously loud (and very artificial sounding) cymbals. And second, while the sensors start MIDI events, they don’t seem to end them. So you hit the snare and GarageBand thinks you’re somehow just holding it down. This isn’t a huge problem if you’re just messing around, because the sounds generally play normally. But it made the system pretty unusable for recording, because you end up with just a solid wall of MIDI data. This was a bit of a disappointment. Being able to use it for recording would have been a pretty significant added value.

Second: I mentioned this in the review, but it bears repeating. It took a lot of fiddling to get everything working exactly as it should be. I had to adjust the tension on all the heads to prevent double hits. I had to loosen the bottom heads to prevent undue noise and resonance. (If I had to do it again, I’d take them off completely, especially the kick drum.)

And the hi-hat was the real beast. Initially I simply could not get the system to reliably recognize whether the hi-hat was open or closed. I moved the sensor pretty much everywhere on the hi-hat, but nothing seemed to work. I finally decided to see if my old set of hi-hat cymbals would work better, so I swapped out the heavy-duty Zildians I’ve been using — also a loan from my friend Lee, come to think of it — for the paper-thin set that came with this kit (a Tama Stagestar, in case you were curious). And that finally did the trick. But thanks to having moved the sensor around so much, it had utterly lost its adhesiveness. So I had to swab the cymbal with rubbing alcohol and then use double-sided tape to affix it. You may notice the really ugly alcohol marks in the video. But it did the trick — that’s what I was playing “Red Barchetta” with.

Third: If the closed/open Yellow/Blue thing gets you excited, I don’t blame you. But keep this in mind: Not every song maps closed hat to Yellow and open to Blue. As I mentioned in the video, even “Red Barchetta” changes up the mapping on Expert (it’s Red/Yellow, I think). In my random and very unscientific experiments, it seemed like maybe half the songs I tried used this method. So if that’s the big selling point for you, you may want to run through your favorite tunes to make sure you’ll actually be able to make the most of this awesome feature.

Although now that I say that, it occurs to me that you could probably jury-rig a system with Y-adapters and extra patch cables to remap the triggers to go wherever you want. The hi-hat sensor detects open/closed status via a stereo patch cable, so you’d have to use splitters on either end, but I don’t see why you couldn’t make it work.

Finally: Had I known my camera did that incredibly obnoxious light-adjustment thing every time I moved my hands, I would have either a.) figured out a different place to shoot, or b.) not moved my hands. Sorry about that. But hey, this is the first video I’ve ever done. Cut me some slack!

So there you go. Got questions about the review or my experience with the GM-1? Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment, and I’ll do my best to answer. Because I care, that’s why.