OK, I’m an apartment-dweller and I want to learn to play drums. It seems to me that a digital drum kit would be ideal for this. I want to keep the cost pretty low, as this is a learner/practice thing and if I decide to join with my friends to play I will by that time hopefully be more advanced and will purchase a regular kit anyway…so ideally I would spend under $300.
So far the cheapest sets I’m finding are Digital Pacific kits, but I’m reading some reviews that talk about some pretty bad lag on the pad responses…any advice? Is “pad lag” just something that I’ll have to live with if I go digital? Or is it a simple fix?
Man, forget about those digital drums. Just get yourself a pair of drumsticks and start tappin’ out the rhythym on any flat surface. It doesn’t matter if it’s pots and pans or the kitchen table or a couple of beer bottles. It’s all in the rhythm man! You keep banging away without all the expensive equipment and you’ll know if you got it in your soul. Then go out and get yourself a set of real drums.
Personal quirk here - I hate digital drums. When you hit a drum it should say BAM, BAM, BAM, not poong, poong, poong!
Pad-lag, as well as cross-talk, are two common phenomena with digital drums that only really go away with price—unless you scratch-build and/or aren’t fussy about having the kit act exactly like acoustic drums, which they will not. Even the newest Roland V-Drums are far away from the feel and sound of even a cheap drumset.
The best thing all around for a beginner drummer, apartment-dweller or no, is to get a pair or two of drumsticks (as suggested) and a good practice pad with which to learn the necessary technique. You don’t have to learn the 40 rudiments right off (in fact, it wouldn’t be too practical to, right off), but learning the proper way to play flams, drags, single and double-stroke rolls, and paradiddles is something that should be done as soon as possible.
Ideally, you’d get a teacher to sort through this mess (it really is the best way), but you can do a good job by learning online, especially at Vic Firth’s website. There are excellent lessons to be had there.
After that, get a snare drum, bass drum, hi-hat cymbal, and a ride cymbal at the very least. You can fit the drums with mesh heads for apartment use and tape towels to the cymbals. No, they won’t sound like real drums, but you’ll be doing good work.
Failing all of that, I’ll have to think of a good digital kit that I’d buy if I wanted. They aren’t the things to learn on, though, since the feel is so remarkably different than real drums—especially for a beginner.
He said that he’s an apartment-dweller. So digital drums would be ideal for him and his situation. I’m a full supporter of digital drums, but they do come at a price for a nice set. If you really want a nice set of digital drums, I would suggest checking them out a music stores, find a set you like, and buy them on eBay. And if you can hold out just a little longer, you can save more, and the prices are still going down.
And nothing against real drums, but I could mic your BAM BAM drums, sample it, and have that same BAM BAM sound triggered by a pad, all in my head phones. That’s all digital drums are really, is a sound sample bank with a realistic setup. And good ones sound just as good as the real deal.
I used the V-drums in an apartment for a few years and never got a complaint (using headphones, of course). However, I wouldn’t think that they would be good to learn on. They do feel remarkably better than any of the other electronic drums I have tried, there is still no substitute for the real thing.
If you do go with electronics, do yourself a favor and stay away from the hard rubber surfaces that some offer. I found that they really hurt my hands.
Having said all of that, a good set of V-drums will set you back thousands of dollars so they aren’t really in your price range.
But then you’re stuck with BAM BAM until the next sampling, which then might consist of stroking the head around 1/4" from that which was originally struck, causing some (in the case of a snare drum) unique snare overtones, then following up with alternation playing the head directly over the snare wires and just off, enabling some unique differences in snare response. You’d need some good triggers to duplicate a bit of that (and the newest V-Drums, while still maintaining a distance from real-drum fidelity, do seem to be at the forefront). I won’t even get into cymbals.
Digital drums are nice for when a wide variety of sounds is needed for an application where the utmost in fidelity isn’t required or if budgets are in place, etc. In my opinion, I’d call the difference between digital drums and acoustic drums as similar to that of a nice, solid upright piano and a concert grand with a sostenuto pedal.
OK, from the responses here and the advice of local music store workers/musicians, I get the following: a digital drum set that costs many thousands of dollars might be worth it, but a digital drum set that costs less than $1500 is likely to be little more than a fancy toy and will not serve well as a learning kit, since the problems with pad-lag and crosstalk and the incorrect “feel” of the pads pretty much ruin everything. A set that costs around $200 (like Pacific Digital’s cheapest kits) is probably so bad that it wouldn’t compare favorably to something you might find at Toys R Us. So it looks like my best bet might just be to stick with a practice pad for the time being. Thanks for the responses!
I suggest one of these pads, or similar if you can find. They have a good feel, and the soft side is quiet enough to play while watching TV. The 12" ones have more of a “snare drum” feel than the smaller ones.
Be sure you roll your sticks for straightness before buying them.
I can tell you something about the Yamaha DD55 --the MIDI signals are not programmable. I bought one maybe 3 years ago to play with making computer music, and I specifically did not want to bother with a full-size setup. The MIDI signal for each pad is supposed to be programmable, but mine isn’t. You program one pad, and that works, it sends properly. But then you go to program another pad, and for some reason the first pad you programmed is now set to some random signal, it’s fucked up. It does not matter WHICH pad you try to set, setting any other pad messes the previous one up–and the instructions do not say that you must program them in any particuar order. Everything else works fine, so I’d be amazed if this was just a problem with mine but who knows. So if you are buying it for a MIDI controller, check around to see if they still have this problem. I couldn’t find anyone else mentioning it, but then most people didn’t seem to ever use it as a controller, they bought it for standalone practice use, especially kids away at college.
I was using Peavy MIDI cables and tried it in a SBLive soundcard, a M-Audio 24/96 card and into the PC’s mobo connection and it had the same problem on all three, so it wasn’t a problem on the receiving end. I bought it for tapping out drum tracks into my PC and it does okay for that, but I have to play the pads and capture the existing MIDI output, and then edit the MIDI notes in the computer software. I never played real drums so I can’t comment much on the differences there.
It also sounds like crap normally, but the speakers in it are only little 2-inch things. It better using good bass-heavy headphones, and sounds way better hooked up to a good full-range amp with decent speakers, like the line-in of a regular stereo. The pads seem to have 9-10 different sensitivity levels, the kick pedal has maybe 3? and the high-hat pedal has only one. The pedals are crap by the way. I never bother to use them.
As to if it is any sort of substitute for real drums, no it isn’t really–but when you live in circumstances where you can’t play real drums, the electronics is way better than nuthin. The good kits do cost up near $1000.
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You’d need some good triggers to duplicate a bit of that (and the newest V-Drums, while still maintaining a distance from real-drum fidelity, do seem to be at the forefront). I won’t even get into cymbals.