What's a good set of e-drums?

[AJOwens]

I've been thinking of getting a Yamaha DTExplorer kit for Christmas. A friend of mine has a set and I play it when I'm over there. It seems to do the job, and I like the samples a lot (the drum kit samples, not the yahoo-people-voices samples). Also the price is right -- they retail for about $700 CDN new. But 2dogs commented in the "Drumming without a drummer" thread that he has one and is not completely happy with it. One problem is that it uses a non-standard MIDI mapping, so I might not be able to patch directly into Reason Adapted to record. I'd have to go through the audio connection from the kit.

He suggests a Roland TD3. But I've tried some Roland kits, and I didn't like the samples (as heard through the headphones supplied at the music store). They seemed boomy and hollow. Unfortunately the shop didn't have any non-Roland kits, so I couldn't compare on the spot.

What would people recommend for a kit so that I can add live percussion to my tracks? I don't need anything fancy, and I don't want to spend a whole lot. (Actually I don't want my wife to spend a whole lot.)

[ken]

I played this Alesis kit at NAMM and was fairly impressed with the feel of the drums and cymbals. Also, the demo of the USB was pretty slick.

http://drums-percussion.musiciansfriend ... sku=491528

Ken

[AGray]

How about those all-in-one sets of percussion pads (e.g. http://drums-percussion.musiciansfriend ... sku=501096 ), for those of us with NO available floor space? I wish I could get something like the Alesis kit Ken mentioned or some vDrums (or a real drumset for that matter), but besides the price issue, I have nowhere to put it, so whatever I do for drums would have to fit on a table or a single stand...

[jeff robertson]

Seems like it would be a fun do-it-yourself project to hack the Rock Band drumset to output midi. Have no idea how easy or hard this would be, though.

[irwin]

Yes, it's possible

[AJOwens]

AGray wrote,

How about those all-in-one sets of percussion pads. . .

It might work for you -- I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for me. As I said in the other thread, playing a drum kit is a full-body experience. I need to make big gestures. I have a Yamaha DD5 -- not as sophisticated by a long shot -- but the point is, I can't keep a beat on it because it's too jeezly tiny.

ken wrote,

I played this Alesis kit at NAMM and was fairly impressed with the feel of the drums and cymbals. Also, the demo of the USB was pretty slick.

Thanks -- looks interesting. There's a set at Dave's Drum Shop in town, so I'll definitely check it out. It doesn't come with a brain -- you have to plug it in to your computer -- hence the reasonable cost for the pad capabilities. I guess you could probably add a brain if it were ever an issue. One question though -- does the kit make much acoustic noise? That could be a problem.

[AGray]

Yes, it's possible

He mentions that the pads are not velocity-sensitive, which I would think would be a deal-breaker in terms of using it as a real instrument...

[AGray]

AGray wrote,

How about those all-in-one sets of percussion pads. . .

It might work for you -- I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for me. As I said in the other thread, playing a drum kit is a full-body experience. I need to make big gestures. I have a Yamaha DD5 -- not as sophisticated by a long shot -- but the point is, I can't keep a beat on it because it's too jeezly tiny.

I've played on drumsets and electronic percussion of all sizes, so for me I just need to be playing with sticks and to have the pads in approximately the correct locations relative to each other, and it looks like the DD5 fails on the latter count. :-/

I've poked around on online store sites a bit, and all I've been able to find out is that the Yamaha DD60 (?) has really unresponsive foot pedals, and Simmons's compact offerings are utter crap.

[AJOwens]

jeff robertson wrote,

Seems like it would be a fun do-it-yourself project to hack the Rock Band drumset to output midi. Have no idea how easy or hard this would be, though.

If you're into DIY, you could get some drum triggers.

[2dogs]

Jim, Something interesting about the USB kit referred to earlier is that should you ever decide to play outside your studio with it, if you have a laptop with a DAW or midi sampler, you could potentially hook the audio output of the laptop to a powered speaker and rock away. The other thing is that you wouldn't be tied to a module that only has 33 kits like the DTX. So as drum midi samples become available you could produce to your heart's content. Mind you the DTX can do that too so if you can get one real cheap, why not. As I shopped for low end e-kits I didn't find too many differences. I went Yamaha because they are reputable essentially and at the time the 600 US was ok. Not great but at the time ok. Too bad you don't want to spend the $8 grand for a Roland TD-20. Now that's a drum kit.

Oh, regarding the tonality of the Roland drums, those things, like the DTX can be tuned to a certain extend. The only thing I regret is not knowing ahead of time that importing more kits would have been a great feature. Otherwise for studio use the DTX is just fine.

[irwin]

jeff robertson wrote,

Seems like it would be a fun do-it-yourself project to hack the Rock Band drumset to output midi. Have no idea how easy or hard this would be, though.

If you're into DIY, you could get some drum triggers.

Combine piezo sensors with recycled containers= DIY E-drums

[irwin]

Yes, it's possible

He mentions that the pads are not velocity-sensitive, which I would think would be a deal-breaker in terms of using it as a real instrument...

The drums do have some sort of sensitivity-- at least they do in the game-- but it's definitely not up to the standards of a real e-kit.

Actually, looks like they've updated the software to understand:

http://jordanbalagot.com/blog/2009/11/0 ... band-drum/

[signboy]

It's a crying shame that all of the e-drum modules are full of sounds that sound like crap. I'd love to be able to trust my laptop enough to bring it on stage, but I don't. aren't there any hardware samplers that can do decent drums?

[AJOwens]

signboy wriote,

It's a crying shame that all of the e-drum modules are full of sounds that sound like crap.

Opinions vary! A lot of people seem to swear by Roland's sounds, but I didn't like the toms. Yamaha sounds, on the other hand, impressed me. The guy at dave's Drum Shop told me that Yamaha uses samples, whereas Roland uses synthesized sounds.

2dogs warned me about the DTExplorer's MIDI mappings, and others have also complained about this. Surprisingly, there's no way to change the MIDI code associated with a pad in the DTXplorer brain. Even my DD5 lets me do that! However, using Reason's NN19 sampler, I can swap in al kinds of sounds at the PC, so this won't limit me.

One of the things I don't like about the DTXplorer is the single-trigger ride cymbal. It goes ting-ting-ting no matter where or how hard you hit it, which is just unnatural. But the guy at Dave's said you can add better cymbals for under a couple of hundred, and the DTXplorer brain will handle them.

[AGray]

Well, I happened to run across the Yamaha YDD-60 at Costco. They were selling it for $100, which is way less than I've seen it anywhere online, and they had one set up to try and the pads and pedals seemed pretty good, so I made it my early Christmas present to myself.

Not bad at all, it turns out. The foot pedals are quite responsive, and the pads are decently responsive too if you chuck the balsa-wood sticks that come with the set and use real sticks with some weight to them.

The built-in sounds are pretty good for the most part, although the toms on most of the kits are pitched too high for my taste, so I'm going to have to go in and put together a custom kit with all the lowest tom sounds. One really cool thing is that several of the kits are ethnic percussion - Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, etc. I haven't tried it through MIDI yet, but at least it has MIDI ports, which puts it above a lot of pad sets in its price range. (The audio line out is a single stereo 1/4" port, but TRS splitters are not expensive.)

I'm having to seriously adjust my playing style, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. My drum training was in jazz, so I got used to incorporating a lot of rolls into my playing a la Mitch Mitchell or Jimmy Chamberlin when I play rock/pop, but that just doesn't work so well on rubber pads - you get either a lot of dropped notes or a lot of unnatural-sounding changes in volume from hit to hit. So I'm having to simplify my technique to get clear, consistent hits, which is probably a good thing for most kinds of music anyway. Either that or just really woodshed my single-stroke rolls.

[AJOwens]

It's going to be a Roland TD-4S. The TD-3 is discontinued, I'm told, although there seem to be a few still around at some music shops. The TD-4 apparently has all-new sounds; definitely it sounded more natural to my ear. This kit is at roughly the same price point as the lower-end version of the Yamaha DTExpress, but in a direct side-by-side comparison, the Roland hi-hat pedal felt more responsive and the cymbals seemed more subtly sensitive to different hits. Also the snare has a mesh head -- not that it will make much difference, given my lack of technique. The Roland kit selection was more useful; Yamaha had too many novelty sets. And the TD-4 MIDI output is remappable. To be fair, we did not find out whether the DTExpress has remapping capability.

You'll hear the e-drums in my entries sometime after Christmas. Maybe even if they're hymns. (I learned drums by playing along with vinyl recordings of Bach fugues, believe it or not.)

If it hadn't been for 2dogs, I might not have looked into this properly. Thanks for the heads up, 2dogs!

[2dogs]

Thanks for the heads up, 2dogs!

You my friend are very welcome. I can't wait to hear the music you'll be making with a set of drums at your fingertips. Enjoy the e-kit.

tap-a-tap-a-tap

[JonPorobil]

Well, I happened to run across the Yamaha YDD-60 at Costco. They were selling it for $100, which is way less than I've seen it anywhere online, and they had one set up to try and the pads and pedals seemed pretty good, so I made it my early Christmas present to myself.

Not bad at all, it turns out. The foot pedals are quite responsive, and the pads are decently responsive too if you chuck the balsa-wood sticks that come with the set and use real sticks with some weight to them.

The built-in sounds are pretty good for the most part, although the toms on most of the kits are pitched too high for my taste, so I'm going to have to go in and put together a custom kit with all the lowest tom sounds. One really cool thing is that several of the kits are ethnic percussion - Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, etc. I haven't tried it through MIDI yet, but at least it has MIDI ports, which puts it above a lot of pad sets in its price range. (The audio line out is a single stereo 1/4" port, but TRS splitters are not expensive.)

I'm having to seriously adjust my playing style, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. My drum training was in jazz, so I got used to incorporating a lot of rolls into my playing a la Mitch Mitchell or Jimmy Chamberlin when I play rock/pop, but that just doesn't work so well on rubber pads - you get either a lot of dropped notes or a lot of unnatural-sounding changes in volume from hit to hit. So I'm having to simplify my technique to get clear, consistent hits, which is probably a good thing for most kinds of music anyway. Either that or just really woodshed my single-stroke rolls.

I have one of these, as well. Got mine for $99 as the Stupid Deal of the Day on Musiciansfriend, but it looks like they don't even carry it at all anymore. I like having the control to play as loose as I like, which most of my other drum solutions don't really allow, but I'm hampered by my own inability to play the drums in general, and, sadly, the YDD-60 isn't a very good tool for learning, because it doesn't even remotely feel like the real thing. Still, I used it to pretty good effect in my "Schadenfreude" and my cover of the Nutwalls' "Crossroads," among other songs.

Have you noticed any idiosyncratic behavior in the high-hat pedal? I've noticed that if you're trying to play anything that requires reasonably quick switching between open- and closed-hat hits, you're going to get some very fake truncated sounds.

Still for a $99 drum kit... crazy. Now I just need a decent set of MIDI drum tones.

[AGray]

Have you noticed any idiosyncratic behavior in the high-hat pedal? I've noticed that if you're trying to play anything that requires reasonably quick switching between open- and closed-hat hits, you're going to get some very fake truncated sounds.

Yes, that's what remains frustrating to me, as there are so many different sounds you can get out of a real hi-hat. Even the timing of hitting an open hat and closing it, a fairly rudimentary technique, is different on this thing than it is on real drums. Still, like you said...

Still for a $99 drum kit... crazy. Now I just need a decent set of MIDI drum tones.

I actually really like kit #5 (although the toms are pitched too high for rock, might have to make a custom kit with lower toms), as well as some of the electronic and ethnic percussion sounds. As for MIDI-type drum tones, Garageband has some great drum sounds, but my MIDI interface has turned up dead, so it'll be a little while before I get to find out how the YDD-60 sounds played through Garageband's drums...

[JonPorobil]

Still for a $99 drum kit... crazy. Now I just need a decent set of MIDI drum tones.

I actually really like kit #5 (although the toms are pitched too high for rock, might have to make a custom kit with lower toms), as well as some of the electronic and ethnic percussion sounds. As for MIDI-type drum tones, Garageband has some great drum sounds, but my MIDI interface has turned up dead, so it'll be a little while before I get to find out how the YDD-60 sounds played through Garageband's drums...

I like a lot of the internal tones, but, since I suck at drumming, I'm looking for a way to record them as MIDI so I can do post-production note-for-note editing. Also, if you're recording direct, it only has a mono out. Them's the breaks, I guess.

If I could figure out a way to import the existing tones as MIDI kits, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The kit variety (especially when you take into account the ability to mix and match) is HUGE, and a lot of them sound just fine.

[AGray]

Also, if you're recording direct, it only has a mono out. Them's the breaks, I guess.

It's got a stereo headphone out, into which you can plug a TRS splitter.

[AJOwens]

FWIW, the TD-4 MIDI output doesn't map successfully to Reason Redrum out of the box. For example, tom 2 produces a cymbal. However, you can remap the MIDI codes in the brain.