Face it – making noise by hitting stuff is fun, which is why Rock Band flew off the shelves despite the high price. Roland are cashing in on this craze with two new products – the HD-1 entry level electronic drum kit and the DT-HD1 drum trainer software.

Roland drum kits are well regarded and the HD-1 has all the usual toys you’d expect from a modern instrument – velocity sensitive pads, MIDI interface etc. No real surprises there except it’s compact size. The thing that caught my attention was the training software.

Reading music is hard work so the guitar hero / Rock band games introduced a much simplified method of displaying musical notation on the screen. Roland have now adopted that approach in their training software – the practical upshot of this is that people who get interested in the drums through the video games (and there will be quite a few of those) will feel right at home when they transition to a grown-up kit. The software also offers a more traditional musical notation and has a range of options including jamming with a backing track.

Neat.