I was recently in the market for a small bass amp because I hate hauling around heavy amps for practices. Instead of a bass amp I decided to buy a keyboard amp. Keyboard amps are usually designed to handle low frequencies. Also they work great for amp modelers and of course keyboards.

I went to my local store intending to buy the Behringer K1800FX. I’ve had pretty good luck with Behringer amps in the past. I have a KX1200 Behringer keyboard amp but it weighs close to 80 lbs.

I’m ready to walk out the door with the Behringer and I noticed the store also had a Roland KC150. I picked up the Roland as was very surprised at how light it was. I think it’s around 30 lbs. The K1800fx is a little over 40 lbs.

I decided to plug them in side by side and give them a try. The Roland has a 12″ speaker and is rated at 60 watts. Volume wise the Roland kept up with the Behringer which is advertised as a 180 watt amp. I strongly suspect that’s peak power and the actual RMS is closer to 90 watts.

Quality wise I think the Roland sounded just a little better when I played some mp3’s through it. It had a well rounded tone and a fairly wide dispersion pattern. The Behringer seemed to have a little too much high end sizzle that is easily tamed by the onboard 7-band EQ. The KC150 only had high and low eq adjustments.

The Behringer had a better range of inputs, a 7 band eq, built in FX with 100 presets. If you tweak the EQ and play with the “shape” button you can make the Behringer sound pretty good. It handles bass with ease and gets pretty darn loud.

The Roland was $349 and the Behringer was $249.

Honestly I was really impressed by the Roland. And if I was looking for a gig worthy amp I would have gotten it over the Behringer. However for my needs it wasn’t worth the extra $100 for me to get the Roland.

For years I have had the BC Rich Warlock Elvira guitar on my Ebay watch list. One finally showed up at the end of last year. The price went to over $200 pretty quickly. The final selling price was $456. A little rich for my blood so close to Christmas.

Here is a link to the original auction.

Note: One year follow up review of the DD-502 here.

One day I went to Guitar Center to check out some guitars. I strolled into the drum room and started to play around with some of the Roland digital drum sets. I was having a blast but don’t have $1000’s of dollars to blow on a set.

I poked around a few drum forums and learned about a kit for sale on Ebay called the OSP DD-502. Most of the posters on the forums were kind of raggin on the OSP set. I chalked it up to the fact they were primarily drummers just being a little harsh.

I took a chance an ordered the DD-502 from Sigler Music on Ebay. This set cost me $399 with free shipping. I also got a free throne and some sticks. The set cam complete with all pedals too. I am quite pleased so far.

Sigler Music ships Fedex and I had it to my house in a matter of days right before Christmas.

Setup took about an hour. I gave the toms a few wacks and was impressed with the sturdiness of the set. I was expecting the frame to be a little flimsy. I plugged the set in and threw on some headphones. This thing didn’t sound too bad !

The drum module comes with 20 drum sets. You can also custom build up to 10 of your own sets choosing from about 230 different sounds. All of the sounds are useful sounds. Another real fun feature is that the module has 50 songs you can jam along with of all different types of styles. Some of the songs sound like cheesy midi compositions but they are a blast non the less.

Check out the video demo ! Just don’t rank on the playing !

One nice thing about buying from Sigler Music is that they also have a retail store. So I felt a little more confident buying from them.

The bottom line this is a totally awesome set for anyone looking to get a knock around set or an introduction to electronic drums.

Download DD-502 manual