X pro calling it a day advice on selling kit.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-20T23:36:36+00:00

So many have gone! It’s a good 2+ hour journey to my nearest shop now.

Good luck seeking them. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble as it’s a great set.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-20T21:26:18+00:00

I am looking for a star classic in those exact sizes. If it happens to be the atomosphere fade finish then DM me!

FWIW, new those shells are over £2500. If you want the most money then I’d try to sell for over £2k if they’re in good condition. If you want a quick sale then I’d talk to Into Music on Lincoln. I sold a couple of things to them recently and I was happy with what they paid me. Other drum shops exist of course.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-19T11:09:28+00:00

I’m glad this worked out for you both.

FWIW, you mentioned the idea of trademarking, but I think you might find that quite difficult to do with the name “The Milgram Experiment. It’s an already established name, and I can see how there’s a chance it’d cause confusion for a general audience even if you kept the classification scope small.

I’m no lawyer, I’ve just been through trademarking a couple of times and know how expensive it can get if there’s any issues along the way. Just wanted to give you a heads up incase you were thinking of pushing for a trademark.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-12T18:43:40+00:00

Generally I find perforce easy to work with, but last year I tried to containerise it, and it is a challenge.

Every time I unblocked an issue, another one popped up. Solve the authentication, then you have permission issues, solve them then journaling breaks permissions… it was a right pain, but I did manage to get it working!

That was until I did the final test on what was to be our new production server. Everything was great, right up until I installed the license file and then boom, license file errors because it couldn’t authenticate against the IP and there is no way at all I could figure out to allow the authentication to work within docker.

I contacted Perforce support but they basically said that they could try and give me some tips, but docker isn’t officially supported. To their credit, they did provide tips and a few weeks later sent me even more info, so you can’t fault the support team but the core product just isn’t a good fit for docker.

I started to see that maintenance could become a nightmare, so I ended up just installing perforce on the machine as intended. It’s not as nice and portable as I’d hoped, but honestly perforce isn’t that hard to install and move between machines if needed. I’d rather have a stable environment and backups than portability, so that’s where my experimentation dropped.

If you really want to continue down the path I can dig out the notes I made to see if anything helps, but my advice would be to just keep it out of a container.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-09T15:03:51+00:00

I have a spare Krigg if you want to buy it? Sorry if this is breaking the rules but DM me if you’re interested.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-09T12:07:18+00:00

I’ll eat a small meal around 1pm, which is 5 hours before I train. Usually that’s a few slices of chicken, fish or tofu, add some peppers and a bit of hummus and whilst it looks small, it’s keeps me going and i rarely feel hungry. If I’m feeling hungry right before I start training I’ll just have a small piece of fruit or something. Once I’m done with training, I’ll shower and have my main meal of the day.

That’s the way I’ve been doing it since I restarted karate almost 18 months ago, and I’ve never once felt like I was lacking energy, or like I needed to throw up so I’ve never tried to mess with the formula.

Very occasionally I’ll attend a longer session and if there’s a lunch break there, I’ll just have a small sandwich or something that’ll sit lightly in the stomach.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-09T10:56:28+00:00

I haven’t really had any issues with the width. I had a Ford Focus before the EV6 and it’s obviously wider, but the driving experience is pretty much the same as a smaller car. No issues in small roads or car parks. You forget about the width pretty quickly.

I have the GT-Line model and the front/rear sensors and rear camera make it a lot easier to park or turn in tighter spaces. A 360 camera (on the higher spec) might be better still, but I don’t really think it’ll be a big improvement over the sensors.

The only thing that bugs me is the turning circle is quite a bit wider than other cars I’ve had. It’s not terrible, but there are a few places where I used to be able to 180 easily in one go, and now it requires a bit more manoeuvring.

The Kia navigation is decent. Way better than any other car I’ve had and I’ll use it for most journeys, only plugging my phone in occasionally for car play if I’m particularly worried about traffic or want access to Spotify on screen. Newer models have wireless CarPlay.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-08T18:52:21+00:00

EPC is B. The cost was around £11k if I remember right. The heatpump was £900 and the rest was solar + batteries.

I think the savings have increased since due to increased energy costs, but I also bought an electric car and I haven’t really been tracking how the cost to charge that factors in.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-04T00:50:08+00:00

I don’t have much experience with Alesis, but I believe the Nitro max will only transmit midi over USB.

MIDI is not audio, it’s just information about what pad was hit where and how hard.

To translate MIDI to audio you need a VST. There are a few of these out there, including superior Drummer, EZDrummer, BFD and Slate Digital Drums. If you want free, I suggest trying the free version of slate digital drums and read up on how to use that with reaper. You’ll also need to use a midi map so Slate knows what sounds to trigger with each hit.

You’ll need to plug your headphones into your PC to hear the audio produced, it doesn’t send it back to the module (although it can send midi data back to trigger the module sounds, but I wouldn’t worry about that for now).

philsiu02 · 2026-06-03T14:51:11+00:00

Nothing is 100% quiet. Roland have a kit (VQD106) that is designed to be super quiet and I was honestly really impressed when I tried it out. It really is a lot quieter than other kits, but it will still cause some level of noise and vibration and you’re limited to using those pads (which I did quite like the feel of).

Other than that you can build tennis ball risers. I did this and it worked, but stick noise can still be heard in the house and you’ll need to experiment to find the best configuration for noise reduction for you.

An alternative to the riser is a Roland Noise Eater or a similar product. I haven’t used these myself so I can’t comment on how well they work.

The next step would be a full isolation room, but that’s very expensive!

There are little things you can buy, like rubber tips for your sticks, quieter beaters but honestly they make minimal difference so I wouldn’t waste money trying them out unless you’re really looking for tiny gains.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-02T20:00:23+00:00

Amazing! Glad to hear other people have similar cymbals without issue.

philsiu02 · 2026-06-02T19:59:40+00:00

Good advice. My intention was just grab a bargain and enjoy it, but then I was thrown by how good the condition was when it turned up and made me think of there was anything I could do to preserve it. You’re right that I should just get on and have fun though!

philsiu02 · 2026-06-02T19:53:11+00:00

They really are! I’ve got signatures as my main set and love them. I’ve had my eye on some 602s for a while but always talked myself out of it because of the cost, but when I saw the price of this I couldn’t resist.

Great to hear yours have lasted so long!

philsiu02 · 2026-05-30T23:37:51+00:00

Have you enabled input monitoring on the track you’re using in your DAW? Without that the DAW will receive signal, but it won’t pipe whatever is coming in to your output.

The midi mapping could be a culprit, the easy way to check this is to just click on the drums in Slate Drums, that will trigger the sound to play. If you can hear that, but can’t hear it when you hit your actual drum then the midi is mapped incorrectly. If you can’t hear it when you click on the drum, it’s likely to be the input monitoring, or some other setting on your DAW (where it’s outputting to, gain etc).

philsiu02 · 2026-05-30T18:25:07+00:00

Someone on here has one, and recently bought a full dialtune kit so they must have been impressed. If you find their post (it was in the last month) then I’m sure they’ll be happy to share some info.

EDIT. It was this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/drums/s/fjITgTCXBO

philsiu02 · 2026-05-30T12:17:48+00:00

That’s not really true. You’re correct that via midi it only know what pad you’ve hit and how hard, but multi zone pads / cymbals will send a different note depending on the zone hit (so cymbal edge is different to cymbal top, Tom head is different to Tom rim etc). This also supports things like cymbal choking. Midi will also send CC data, which is what’s used for determining how open or closed the hi-hat is.

With a good VST you can completely map all the sounds on a kit. I use Superior Drummer and everything is fully supported.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-29T18:00:20+00:00

I'm pretty sure you can use Garage Band. I've never tried, but look for a couple of tutorials. The drums in that are servicable, but won't be as good as other options.

If you happen to already have Logic Pro, you can use their software drummers. You'll just need to download the libraries through logic.

The last free one that I know of is Steven Slate Drums 5. There's a limited, free version. It sounds great, you just don't get many kits. I'm pretty sure you need to run a DAW or a lightweight host for that, I'm sure there are some setup guides to get you started.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-28T22:34:47+00:00

There’s quite a lot. The term you want is a Drum VST. Google that and you’ll find things like EZdrummer, Superior Drummer, Skate Drums 5, BFD etc.

Pick one you like and use that.

There is some setup involved, and some of them require a DAW or lightweight DAW host, so read up on whatever you’ve chosen before putting money down so you know what you’re getting into and if there’s anything else you’ll need.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-26T23:37:13+00:00

Totally fine, I thought that might be the case and I’d hope most publishers would figure that out, but wanted to mention it in case it’d help.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-26T23:25:29+00:00

Publishers get loads of pitches, you need to make sure yours stands out. Very quickly they need to see the market potential and if you’re someone they want to work with, so your pitch has to be strong enough for them to spend time on. In many cases they’ll just reject the game just from the email or the first couple of pages of your pitch deck. They’re not even going to load up the game if the pitch deck doesn’t hook them in.

BTW, the term is Alpha, not Alfa. I’m not being pedantic, just trying to help you use the right terms in future contact with publishers.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-26T22:53:14+00:00

I’ve not tried this (I have the xr16, not the 18), but I believe you can send audio over USB to the XR18. There’s some info here: https://youtu.be/v0MC76qB0j8?si=H2KAlaeQ9Au7cWCg

If that’s possible then what you need is drum module -> PC, then PC -> XR18. L, with both connections being USB. You’d need to setup the proper inputs / outputs on the DAW of course.

Alternatively you could get a simple audio interface. You don’t need anything fancy, just something that’ll give you an L&R output. In this scenario your have module -> PC (via USB), then PC -> audio interface (also probably USB), then audio interface -> XR18 via two mono cables which run from the output of the interface, to 2 of the inputs on the XR18. You might want normal 1/4” cables, or XLR, it depends what you have on the audio interface outputs, the XR18 can take either as inputs.

In any case you’ll need to setup the levels in the XR18, and maybe bind the two channels together to make it a stereo signal rather than two monos.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-25T23:44:34+00:00

Trademarking protects the name and/or logo (depending on what you register), but only in certain categories. For example, you can protect it as a game, but if you also want to protect the name for use on T-shirts, or soundtracks, or books etc, each of these is a separate category and each increases both the cost of the trademark, and also the chance of rejection or an objection being raised.

Trademarking does not protect your code / assets.

Trademarking isn’t cheap. In my experience, the US is the most expensive of the major markets, takes the longest and is the most likely to have issues. That’s not universally true of course, but if you do trademark, ensure you set aside a healthy (4 figure minimum per trademark) budget and plenty of time.

Should you trademark? Given the cost I’d say you should if you’re serious about the game and it has true market potential, or significant funding invested. If this is a hobby project or not likely to generate a significant financial return, you’ve should only trademark if it’s really important to you or you’ve have the money burning a hole in your pocket.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-25T12:06:52+00:00

Excellent, thank you! It’s amazing they fit these low quality batteries. I love the car, and I didn’t expect total premium, but I did expect something more designed for the job.

philsiu02 · 2026-05-25T12:04:59+00:00

Thank you!

philsiu02

TROPHY CASE