[Electronic Drums] Any drummers here?

[DaveTN]

I played the drums for a little bit when I was kid, over 40 years ago and haven’t touched a set since. On a whim I told the wife the other day I was going to buy a set of drums. She said she wasn’t going to put up with the noise.

Is it possible to learn to play and practice on a set of electronic drums using headphones? I’ve never even seen a set in real life. Are they quiet?

I did a little bit of research and they look like they cost more than a set of real drums?

Comments...

[Guest gw2and4]

I'm a professional drummer in Nashville and there is much advice on this topic. Electronic drums definitely cost more than real drums. I advised another friend last week to get mesh drumheads for real drums. Pearl used to include them on their Rhythm Traveler kit and then you have flexibility. It would probably be a lot less money than buying a decent set of electronic drums with tunable (i.e. tension adjustable) heads.

PM me for more info if you need any help. I'm happy to be the friendly neighborhood SME for all things drums. Not that anyone would need that on a gun board LOL

Sent from my iPhone 4

Edited February 25, 2012 by gw2and4

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Hi Dave

There would be the sound of sticks hitting rubber, but not near as loud as something like a ludwig black beauty deep body brass snare drum. I swear black beauties are about as loud as a shotgun when a drummer puts his back into it. Well, a buddy had an old deep-body yamaha maple snare loud enough put a black beauty to shame. There was just no way to play that yamaha quietly, regardless how soft you would play it.

Electronic drums are a compromise. They have significant advantages along with some limitations. It can depend on the style of music and how much expressivity you want/need. For instance it would be easier to play "authentic" funk, rock or "pop" country styles on a fully-electronic set, and more difficult to play mainstream jazz or "old timey" country on a fully-electronic set.

Some of the very-expensive fancy electronic drums are designed for expressivity rivaling acoustic percussion, but I haven't heard of anything cheap that has lots of expressivity. Maybe there are some newer cheap systems more expressive nowadays.

Acoustic drums have more expressivity but many styles of music are not so dependent on needing the expressivity. For instance even a simple finger cymbal or wood block can make a wide spectrum of sounds just depending on how you play the little instrument. But MOST electronic drums will not output a wide range of tones according to how you play them. For instance there are some fancy electronic controllers and drum brains that might sound realistic on a snare drum press-roll, but then again there are a lot of setups that will make a press-roll sound more like a machine gun.

But if the diff is between being able to play at yer house versus not being able to play, then a fully electronic set will get the job done, unless you want ot play something like mainstream jazz. IMO.

Electronic drums have the advantages of being able to pick a very wide range of drums and sound effects (but you typically don't have as much expressive control over each sound). Your one snare pad can sound like hundreds of different snare drums, just depending on what sounds are in your drum brain or external-connected MIDI synthesizers. You can go from a piccolo snare to a steel marching snare at the press of a button.

Drummers on volume-sensitive gigs can more easily "turn down" an electronic set without having to play awkwardly light. In addition, on the kinds of music electronic drums are friendly to, it can be a pain to get good miking of a drum set. Especially on small stages. So sometimes it is easier to put a higher-quality drum sound out into the main sound system with electronic drums, compared to a zillion mics. Kick drums can be especially difficult to mike. It isn't true rocket science, but then again not every fool can stick a mic on a kick drum and get a good sound out of the PA.

I've worked with drummers that will carry an acoustic set and put pickups on most of their set. That way they can cover the stage volume and PA cymbals and "overall top end" sound with one or two overhead condenser mics aimed down over the drummer's head, and maybe a snare drum SM57 mic. Then whatever kick or toms go out over the sound system come from the drum brain rather than mics.

I don't get around to recording any more, but built an electronic set 20 years ago or so that still works. Didn't want to buy an acoustic set to keep in the studio. Many various problems with that. But wanted a set drummers could play without toting over a complete set.

It would make better sense at today's prices just to buy a brain and set of pads, or a combo setup of both, but back then electronic pads were kinda expensive. I had got an Alesis DM-5 drum brain. Surprisingly Alesis still makes those things, or just recently stopped making em--

http://www.alesis.com/dm5

Hook up the pads and route the MIDI out to the computer sequencer and route the audio out to the mixing board. I would typically record the "real" cymbals and hihat, and usually a real snare, with mics in audio, and record the kick and the rest of the set in MIDI. Thataway if I wasn't quite happy with the job the drummer did, I could more easily edit the midi tracks to fix timing or delete/add notes to make the track fit better. That can also be edited in audio, but it is more work to edit the audio tracks.

I was so cheap, found a full set of used remo practice pads, and bought a few used electronic drum pads happened on cheap, and a used Roland kick drum controller. It took more fiddling than I expected, but retrofitted radio shack piezo buzzer disks internal to each remo practice pad. To avoid breakage of the piezo disks, eventually had to put some fiberboard under the remo drum heads, and glue quarter-inch-thick rubber discs on top of the remo drum heads. I could play the pads without breaking the piezos, but real drummers would sit down and kill half the piezos within 15 minutes till I "hardened" them up.

It was conceivable to record the electronic cymbals, hat, and snare, but I'd use real cymbals and was real fond of a low-tuned brass piccolo snare. The little piccolo snares are not crazy loud and I'm very fond of the tone if they are tuned significantly lower-pitched than they were designed for.