BLIPS: Mike Sutton - Roland DWe Wireless Electronic Drums

~ Mike Sutton returns to share the latest developments with The DWe drum kit, an innovative, convertible acoustic-electronic drum set developed collaboratively by Drum Workshop (DW) and Roland. Sutton is the DWe Brand Manager at Drum Workshop.

Every DWe acoustic-electronic convertible drum set is entirely designed and handcrafted in the USA at DW's factory in Oxnard, California. They use the exact same North American Hard Rock Maple shells as the flagship Collector's Series.

Please visit-
dwdrums.com/dwe/drum-sets

Recorded July 2026 on the phone between Palmdale, CA and Orange County, CA.

*Photo of Mike Sutton and Alex Gonzalez

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:15

Let's do this.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

All right, we are back. This is Creativity is Secure. I'm your host, Malcolm Orr, and once again I have invited back my good friend, Mike Sutton. How you doing, Mike?

SPEAKER_02 0:27

I'm good. How you doing, Malcolm?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

I'm good. And where are you speaking to us from today? I am still out in the high desert of Palmdale, California.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

I am in Orange County today, or it's nice and toasty.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Yeah, it's actually getting up to 100 today. What's it looking like for you?

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Well, I think I looked outside, it was about 83 to 87. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Well, the heat index makes it even more fun.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

It's muggy. It's pretty muggy.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

All right. Well, today I would like to ask you, since you've been on the show, what's new with the Roland DWE kit?

SPEAKER_02 1:01

So DWE kit is an acoustic electronic wireless kit. The idea behind it is we take a really nice high-end premium DWE DW kit using a collector collector shell, and we install wireless triggers inside of it. So you still get the nice look and feel of an acoustic kit. Yeah. And also the setup and ease of an acoustic kit with no cabling. And then we pair it together with wireless technology for triggering that can go pretty far. I mean we can go up to technically we can go up, I think, up to about 100 feet away from the drums from the wireless receiver, but we can tell everybody to keep it close just for line of sight and normal triggering. But you know, it's a really killer kit for that setup. It's the best feeling electronic kit you'll ever play by far. Because you're playing in a real drum, not playing a pad, you're playing the actual drum with a mesh tag. So it's not the quietest, but it's quieter than the acoustic kit. So you still get all that tactile feel. And you can always take the trigger out, put regular heads on it, and play DW kit.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

You know, I used to be a minister, and I remember when people would come into the church and we had an electronic drum kit, which was a good rolling one. A lot of drummers are put off because it seems too foreign to them, you know, hitting mesh pads or rubber pads. And this, for people that haven't tried it, just feels like a real drum set, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:23

Yeah. It's the it's the closest thing you're gonna get to a to regular feeling kit by far, philotronics. You know, real sizes, you have from eight to sixteen on the toms, 20 and 22 inch bass drums, you know, real big real bass drum sizes. So that makes a huge difference for playability. Also, a big factor is all the hardware on the drums is the same stuff that's on a regular DW kit. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

So, what about like a rim shot? How does that feel?

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Great. You're hitting a metal rim, like a regular drum rim.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

So it's um, yeah, it's you feel even when you cross sticks, same thing, you get that same sensation with hitting a cross stick on a metal rim of a sandrum.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, because I have a pretty good rolling kit, uh, electronic kit that I practice with my band with, but what I've noticed is doing jazz or Latin is tricky because you know can't use brushes and stuff like that. So, how does it translate on the DWE kit if you're playing more subtle music?

SPEAKER_02 3:14

So that works pretty well. The only thing we can't do, we can't do brushes because we just our trigger technology doesn't do capacitive. We're using a different setup with FSR sensors and PSOs.

SPEAKER_03 3:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

So we're not we're not doing capacitive like uh like a rolling kit with a plastic brush. You can't do that one. But if we're playing just about everything else, yeah, it's pretty good because you're still playing with both sides. Maybe playing a songgo, a cerdo, or a or a bambay, or a mambo, like that's gonna feel really comfortable because you're getting up a smaller drum to a bigger Fortom, you're gonna get that same type of feel. If you're doing it with the module setup, the ease of use is even greater because then you have you know all the rolling sounds you can download DW sounds into the enrolling modules now. So that means that your sound palette is much lighter, more flexible that you can kind of play with. And if you want to go do the production, we give you a copy of CW Soundworks so you can plug it into your favorite doll and do it that way too.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

I wanted to ask you about the sounds. I know it comes with preset sounds, and then you can buy more sounds to utilize. And you know that I like experimental music, so I'm looking at your new legacy electronics sound collection, and I love that I'm looking at this and it says that I can play like a Roland 808, but on real drums.

SPEAKER_02 4:32

Yeah, yeah, and that's and that's for like the DW Soundware stuff where we have, you know, we added a lot more sounds the past year or so. You know, we have more metal sounds, we added more electronic sounds, we had more drum, different drums from our different collections of drum shells for that world. We even added like a new vinyl rock pack, it's more like a classic rock with the Slingerland kit in there. That's great for the production world, doing it that way. If you're going in the module world and you go in the rolling cloud connect app, which is another another app with many apps that use the word cloud, but that's a new one for the for the modules and hardware. And there you're gonna find stuff for the 50th anniversary, you'll find the Slingerland kit in there, you'll find a Purple Heart, you'll find the Jasmine Apple Gum series, you know, SFC and S Santa Monica is gonna be in there at one point, you'll find some more stuff in there. So, you know, we keep adding more and more sounds to kind of help drummers on one side and then also to help producers on the other side with the soundworks stuff.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

You know that I'm the mayor of Simpleton, so I must ask you can you record with the DWE kit and then change the sounds later from the sounds that you recorded with?

SPEAKER_03 5:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Oh my God, that's so amazing. That must be incredible for producers.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Oh, yeah. I mean, if you're doing it in the if you're using it as a production tool and you hook it up to your computer, and just the kit hooked up to the computer in your triggering software, yeah, triggering UW soundwork, for example, in your dog. So you do it in Proto Tools, Logic, Q Base, you pick your favorite dog. You can record MIDI, and then you're like, okay, my performance is good. Oh, maybe I need to clean it up. I missed a snare drum head here. I want to change that verse from a from a drum head sound on the snare to a acrostic. Well, I can grab the MIDI notes, move it down. There, I've changed the tonality of the of that section. And I can I can go in and in software and just change presets or pick different drums, like, okay, this fits the song perfectly. If I'm going, if I'm going live with a module, you know, like a V71 for like a tour or a bigger show, I have the ability to have sounds in that and have everything assigned how I want it, and then have all the individual outside of the back of the module to go to front of the house and monitor land.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

One reason why I'm excited to try this kit is when I grew up, a lot of the people I listened to, like the police or Tom Waits, you know, they weren't making the timing perfect. They let the music breathe and speed up and slow down. There was no beat detective. So I think it would be exciting for me to, you know, plug into these sound banks you have, whether it's like a Lin drum or a roll and drum machine, and you can get those sounds, but you're letting the music breathe, and you can have some of these imperfect feels that feel a little more organic or human.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Yeah. And especially if like you work a like a live show, one of the great things with the with the module setups is they can import samples into them as well. So you can have your own custom stuff that you would like to work on. Bring it in, layer it in with the stuff that's built into the module or the what or even expansion packs you've loaded into it, and kind of tailor it to what you want with the kit, because it's also an acoustic kit. You don't have to play the whole thing electronic. Yeah, you can have a couple drums that are acoustic, like say Kick and Snare are electronic, so that way you can kind of you know do all the songs you need and leave your tones acoustic.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

You can really blend, yeah. That's so cool.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

You can you can blend it so you can really make a true hybrid setup.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Before we go, my last question for you is I'm looking at your website now. There's different bundles. I see like a four-piece and a five-piece. Can you tell me the different configurations?

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Sure. So I'll start with my most popular one: our five-piece bundle. It's a 1012, 16, 22, and a 6.5 by 14 snare. And the Tom sizes are 8x10, 9x12, 14 by 16, typical GW sizes. The base room's a little shorter. We didn't do the normal 1822. We went 1622. So you still got a nice punchy amount of base room when you play it acoustically, but it's a little bit shallower, so you can get it more soldiers depending on the wood. And then we also have a four-piece setup, which is a nine by twelve, a twelve by fourteen, a fourteen by twenty, and a five by fourteen for a more compact setup if you need it. And we also have an eight seven by eight as an add-on, and any of the drums I listed before can be bought individually. So you can kind of custom make your configuration to how you want. So if you wanted to do a one up, two down, you can do that. Or you can do a three up, one down, or three up, two down. You can kind of you know go customize your how many sizes you want in six finishes, three lacquer finishes and three finish by finishes that are pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

And I see that everything comes with the super awesome DW5000 series hardware packs.

SPEAKER_02 9:20

Yeah, we have options for drummers. So if you need to buy a whole complete kit, you need that you need hardware, you need cymbals, you need the module setup, or not and you need drums. We have we have a kit bundle for that. We have a couple variations of it to kind of fit what you need. But if you already have your drum hardware, you can just get a shell pack and get your symbol pack and then a module setup, or if you're just gonna do software, then just a shell pack and symbol setup. It's pretty modular how we do this because we know every drummer's setup is a little different, yeah, and they have different needs. I know some some players that play with acoustic symbols on the kit. Yeah, that's what they want to do. Great, you can do that. I know some of them that do electronic symbols and acoustic drums, the complete inverse. Great, you can do that too.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

So cool. Wow, so many options, Mike Sutton. I really want to thank you for coming back and talking. And I can't wait until I can actually try one of these in person. Really looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_02 10:19

Yeah, let me know when we uh we can uh get together and I'll show you in person. You're gonna just sit there and go, uh I don't understand what black magic you guys have under the box.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Where have you been all my life?

SPEAKER_01 10:44

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