The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So, my son is taking drum lessons and I work his ass off practicing lessons...no, he likes it. We have the Yamaha DD-65 Digital Drums, which has been great so far (along with a practice pad) since it makes some noises. But I'm now looking for a "real" set of the electric type.

We can start small (sd, hh/pedal, bd/pedal) and build on later, as to keep cost down. I would want to be able to record midi as well as audio, and mix an MP3 playing in to play along with. So, the head is as important as the pads. Mix and match works as well, obviously.

Some heads don't allow much custom mixing, etc. We don't need zillions of sets, the basics plus some fun ones, but being able to adjust the mix between sounds, and reasonable midi/audio out capabilities are a must.

This may be more about me (!) and the better the kit the better my future tracks will sound
But I am truly hoping my son gets addicted and takes this as far as he can rock.

Ken, you no doubt have opinions. And I welcome others' qualified opinions about which of the ~$500 sets are worth while. And more importantly, if you or anyone you know are selling a good set...let me know!

I guess I would just get whatever is cheap:

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/drums-pe ... 9000000000

I played the an Alesis kit at NAMM with their "surge" cymbals and thought they were pretty sweet. I also preferred the USB systems without tone modules since everyone has a laptop these days, you can just use it as your module.

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/drums-pe ... 8000000000

I would suggest you take a trip to your local Guitar Center and try out the different kinds of pads. One thing to consider is that the hard rubber pads are actually kind of loud when you bang on them. They make about as much noise as hitting a book. (In fact when I had a Yamaha DTXpress kit set up in my bedroom on wood floor and tracked a song, my roommates thought there was an earthquake. Because I had headphones on, I had no idea they were standing right behind me wondering what the hell was happening. PS - I do not recommend this kit.) The kind with actual drum heads are a little quieter, but still make noise. The quietest (if this is even a consideration for you) are the mesh heads. They feel a little bouncier than the others, but at at least quiet on impact. Of course, you will still have hard rubber cymbal triggers.

Of course, I suggest looking on Craigslist for a used kit: http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/msg/2710538454.html

Having said all of that, let me encourage you to buy acoustic drums instead. You can put towels over the drums to deaden the heads and bring the sound level down to about what you will get with the rubber pads. And, if your son continues to play in the future, he will be ready to jam with his friends.

Ken

Thanks Ken. No, acoustic drums simply are not an option when living in apartments in NYC. The Simmons SD5K are a likely option. I'd love to spend more (Roland are the best) but it's just not in the cards right now.

I bought an electronic kit a couple of years ago. I chose the Roland DD-4 over a Yamaha kit at roughly the same price, mostly based on user reviews. Basically I'm happy with it, but in retrospect, here's what I don't like about the DD-4. (And I'm sure I'd be finding faults with the Yamaha if I'd bought that instead.)

- Cabling. The pads are wired to the heads with a custom DB-25 connector octopus. If it fails, it would be pricey to replace. The Yamaha uses multiple standard 1/4" guitar cords.

- Head position. The head is placed so that the controls are obscured by the toms under most playing conditions. It's easy enough to move the toms aside temporarily to change voices or turn the thing on or off, I guess. You can't move the head somewhere else on the kit because the custom cable isn't long enough -- although you can insert a standard DB-25 printer cable as an extension.

- Voices. A lot of drummers swear by Roland samples, but on this particular kit the presets are boomy for my tastes, and there's not very many presets, and not that much variety among them. Using the pokey control panel, you can alter the presets and save your settings, if you have the patience, but you can't rename them or add new ones. So you'll always have a kit called "Heavy," whether or not you replace the sounds to make your own Latin kit.

- Output. When connected to a standard preamp line-in, the twin 1/4" outputs don't seem to have as much oomph as other devices. You have to turn your preamp output up to 10, and you'd use 11 if you could.

- MIDI. There's no MIDI in, so you can't drive the kit automatically. The MIDI out does not play well with Reason Adapted, and there's no built-in remapping capability. You can remap in Reason or whatever, but for complex interacting controls like the hi-hat I haven't found a satisfactory solution. But I've heard the Yamaha has similar issues.

I've had my eye on the Simmons unit for a while. Let me know how it works out. I'm sure it's way better than the Ion iDM02 I ended up going with (which was made of fragile plastic and had terrible pads and was generally a piece of poo).

Incidentally, Ion is Alesis' off-brand, and the next percussion input device I got was an Alesis drum pad thing and it had just as many (albeit completely different) problems as the Ion, so I still just sequence my drums with a mouse or by banging on a keyboard.

Pintech makes a fairly nice alternative to the Roland V-Drums. Similar woven head technology compared to the hard rubber pads of the Simmons or Yamaha sets which will make for much happier neighbors. You can pick them up fairly cheap on E-Bay. I have played them before and liked them, but I'm a guitar player who dabbles in drums, not a drummer. Also, the set I played on had a pretty nice Roland drum module on it. I think it was a TD-8 or maybe the TD-10. Anyway the guy who owned pieced it together for a lot less than a V-Drum set.

Simmons SD5K are $299.99 this week at Guitar Center. We like them so far!