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Looking to buy some electronic drums as a Christmas present this year. Budgeting between $500-$800, not against scouring craigslist for a good deal. I mostly just want to know what to avoid all together either because it's crap equipment or has no scalability.
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Nov 14, 2014 18:58
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 20:48 |
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Avoid anything that's not roland or yamaha, but you'll definitely need to buy second hand to get something that's not too limiting in feature set and pad feel. Scalability in the mid to low end generally extends to adding an extra tom and cymbal, loading external sounds and kits isn't common in this price range either but they will all output midi for control of external software. Alesis have some pretty good low end kits too but avoid the ones that use the realhead skins because they are loud and dent up really easy, get as many mesh skinned drums as you can afford.
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Nov 15, 2014 17:38
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I've heard of people saving some cash by either buying drums individually used but I think you'd still spend quite a bit and would probably be scouring eBay/craigslist for months to find deals. However, it does open up the option of just buying the drums and getting a simple controller to midi into a computer, depends on how far you want to take that (the brain can be anywhere from 500-2k of the price from what I've seen). The roland/yamaha brains on the high end are pretty excellent and do a lot of nice stuff in terms of position sensing (although you pay a ton for it and so far it doesn't come close to an acoustic set) but I think you'd get better results with a midi setup over the low end and mid range stuff. Definitely second using roland and yamaha only though. I have a little experience with simmons and alesis and did not like them, and I've only heard bad things about build quality. Never used pintech or behringer stuff but haven't heard great things there either except for the very high end pintech stuff and at that level (3-4k) you might as well buy a roland or yamaha IMO. Mesh heads are necessary for anything you want to do any kind of nuanced work on (e.g. anything beyond simply triggering a one shot sample)
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Nov 15, 2014 23:12
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I have a little experience with an Alesis kit, and whilst it does output MIDI, the pads are loud as hell 'in the room' and it seems the default velocity settings require you to hit far harder than an actual kit to get a decent sound out of. Plus the pads are tiny, and hard to set up in a decent, natural feeling spacing- it's more like a very expensive toy.
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Nov 18, 2014 02:17
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Just a counter-point, make sure you try out a bunch of kits at a local music store to see what you like. I personally can't stand mesh heads and much prefer the Yamaha DTXtreme rubber pads.
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Nov 19, 2014 04:25
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I recently got a Roland TD1KV. It's cheap and great for the price. Nice mesh snare and choke-able cymbals. Can expand with an extra cymbal or upgrade the pedals. Can hook up to your compy via USB for midi triggering. Has a built in coaching mode that measures your accuracy plus 15 kits and songs. Nice and compact too!
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Nov 19, 2014 13:36
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I bought an used Alesis DM5 kit for cheap a few years ago, and while you can drum on them, they're not really fun to play on. I'd recommend saving up for a Roland or Yamaha kit.
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Nov 25, 2014 01:46
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magnafides posted:Just a counter-point, make sure you try out a bunch of kits at a local music store to see what you like. I personally can't stand mesh heads and much prefer the Yamaha DTXtreme rubber pads. To be honest I don't really like either but I also prefer the rubber simply because I hate the mesh. However, I had a chance to demo a 2box drumit5 over the weekend and was really impressed. 2499 at Sam ash, 1999 open box, really impressive and configurable brain, and imo by far the best feel of any electric kit I've used. The brain doesn't have the onboard effects and configurability of the td30 but you can configure the poo poo out of it and add whatever samples you want with usb, there's a ton of videos on their site. My only caveat is that I didn't get to try the hi hat because they were set up with those zildjian electric cymbal deals. The other cymbal pads were present and were comparable to Roland/Yamaha. It looks weird compared to the other kits but I thought for the price they can't be beat and am strongly considering buying one. Definitely worth checking out.
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Nov 26, 2014 09:41
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What do people have against mesh? I love them, they are quiet and very responsive, and the bounce is very similar to a regular skin if you tension them properly (all mesh skins need tensioning out of the box, they do feel a little flat until this gets done).
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Nov 26, 2014 13:05
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 20:48 |
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I only just started drumming but I would recommend the Roland TD-11KV. It retails new for $1,600 but I was able to snag one barely used for around $980 off eBay for local pick up. Granted I don't play an acoustic kit and I'm new to drumming but I like the feel of the mesh pads. After two months of playing on it the kit hasn't really shown much wear and is very reliable. The on board sounds leave a little to be desired but I usually jam through MIDI-out to EZDrummer 2. I've played a DW acoustic kit the drummer in my band uses and I found everything translated over quite easily.
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Jan 7, 2015 23:44
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