Ya, I am using spd-20 for 3 years till date, and it has served me for 178 stage shows and innumerable rehearsals without any tinge of problems.It provides excellent quality digitally sampled sounds, with 99 patches and two patch banks.In each patch, u can assign two tones to each pad by layering,so it gives u storage of about16 sounds per patch. Awesome!! However, it lacks stage appearance,i.e. when u play a drumkit and a spd-20 side by side,The acoustic kit would surely overshadow your spd-20 by it's huge and shiny stage-show.So, if u want stage show as a vital factor, spd-20 is not for u. But if u have enough confidence in your playing efficiency, then u can make your spd-20 overcome this drawback by it's superb compact digital output, mixed with your playing capacity,obviously. The eight pads on it's surface may get weared away by repeated hitting of sticks, so I prefer cover the pads by coverings like x-ray plated and synthetic layers. Also, in shows at places with poor acoustics(small halls), u may have howling effects fro your drumkit but with your spd-20, u can simply regulate it's volume accordingly. Also, U need a lot of time to assimilate your drumkit for playing, but your spd-20 is just get-set-go!This is an important factor in competitions, where time is handy. U can add effects like delay, flanger,reverb etc. to your own satisfactory requirement, without depending much on the sound engineers. Tuning of pitch is handy, and here u do it simply selecting the pitch parameter within a flicker,whereas in drumkits, it requires lot of hazards in tuning. All over a wonderful equipment to play!!!

I have the Roland SPD11 and the Roland SPD20 I play them at church as the leading Drums. They're also great to play as drums in country or rock bands. I take them with me and play with any band.Hook them up to a amp and play them. They have a great Drum sound. I have a medial shift in my back and I can't play reglar drums because I can't twist my back. Therefore, the Roldand SPD20 is just right for me to continue to play drums.

I play in an orchestra that has absolutely no budget for percussion equipment. We need tympani for most of our performances, so we usually rented them for our concerts. That left me in the lurch for our rehearsals. I didn't like to play tympani in a concert without any rehearsal time on the drums, plus it was unsettling to the rest of the ensemble to not hear the tympani and other percussion until our public performance. The Roland SPD-20 was the answer for me. It can produce about 700 different percussion sounds, including orchestral instruments such as tympani, xylophone, bells, chimes, bass drum, snare drum, and just about anything else we could ever require. (It even gave us the "alarm clock" and "boing" sounds needed for Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock," and the taxi horns in the required pitches for Gershwin's "An American in Paris"). Musical percussion instruments can be tuned to pitch and the pads will respond to stick speed and intensity. It's versatile: do you need dogs barking in tune? (example: Anderson's "The Waltzing Cat") The Roland SPD-20 can do it.It's not perfect and it has a few quirks that take some getting used to. But it's reliable enough that we used it for the tympani solos at the beginning of Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathrustra" (a/k/a "Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey") and at the end of Stravinski's "The Firebird." Real tympani are better, definitely, but they cost $30,000 more, and they can't ever sound like a set of chimes. In addition to the 8 trigger pads, each of which can be set for a different instrument, or a different pitch, or different decay rate, etc., the SPD-20 will also accept up to four additional percussion trigger pads, each of which can also be set for any of the 700 instruments or at a different pitch. I picked up some Roland PD-5 and PD-9s for that. Don't lose the owner's instruction manual, because you'll need it for the entire time that you own this. I picked up an extra one on eBay, just in case. You will also need an amplifier with this. Don't use a cheap guitar amp. An electronic piano amp is ideal for this. Roland makes several of those. You can also use headphones with this for private practice. This product is best for "background" type percussion. I was leery of using it for "Also Sprach Zarathrustra," for example, because the tympani solos are so exposed there. It was OK for that, but it's just not "exactly" right for tympani solo sounds, and certainly not as responsive as real tympani would be. But if you're looking for something for a combo band, such as a rock band, then the SPD-20 will be a terrific addition to your drum set. I won't give it 5 stars, because I save that for the very best products imaginable, and there's still room for improvement in the Roland PSPD-20. But it's close, so I'll give it 4 stars. Jon A. DuncanPercussionistChicago Bar Association Symphony OrchestraChicago, IL