Evans Portal + Built-In Compute

Feature Requests
1

Hi Sensory Percussion team. I have a moonshot ‘someday’ feature request: an Evans Portal with integrated compute (e.g., Raspberry Pi) that boots directly into a “player mode” version of Sensory Percussion. Ideally the on-device UI would be preset-only (next/prev), while all editing happens on a computer and gets exported/synced to the Portal.

I’ve tried the “computer + VST” route in a volunteer church scenario, and even though it’s theoretically simple, it was just too complex and led to constant issues. Because of this I can’t move forward with SP at my church, despite its obvious superiority in terms of playability and realism. Having a “standalone module” that can run SP in a “player mode” would remove this barrier for me and countless others. The $2500 price tag of the Pearl Mimic Pro was an easy yes. And a similarly priced SP player would be an even easier yes.

Thanks.

2

@srbrandon what issues did you run into with the computer + VST scenario?

3

We occasionally had issues with midi or audio not connecting, and most volunteers couldn’t troubleshoot these problems. After this happened a few times, we decided we needed a hardware-only solution to avoid these technical issues. That’s why we switched to the Mimic.

4

@srbrandon that makes sense. I bring a laptop to church and run drums through SD3, but if there’s another drummer, I set it up for them to just use the Roland td27 module only.

When I saw the release of the new cymbal sensors, I got really excited at the idea of using low volume cymbals instead of rubber in the church setting, but I think we’d run into the exact issue you’re describing: too complicated for non technical folks.

One other question - how was the latency when running SP → VST in a live setting?