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[mcc]

I have decided I am going to try to obtain some kind of electronic drumset.  I know nothing about this subject and I do not know how to play the drums. I have this idea I can get something that is set up like the drumset from Rock Band, but when you hit things it plays sampled or synthesized drums or something. I saw something like this for sale at Best Buy once and i'm not even sure what the vocabulary for it is. Ideally whatever I get, I would be able to plug a MIDI cable into it (or are they replacing MIDI with USB these days? I Just want to be able to input MIDI into a sequencer program) or else in a pinch plug just a sound cable into it and plug that directly into my computer to record audio. I am intending this only for recording music with the computer.

I originally wanted to get a "real" drumset because I am usually very sensitive to sampled instruments feeling more fake and repetitive than live ones, but then I realized that since this really is all for recorded music getting live drums would require me to learn a great deal about things like drum tuning and more about recording practices than I know now (most home-recorded drums seem to have very bad digital clipping and have this not-altogether-pleasant punchy sound to all the drums, and I've been told the "correct" way to record drums is to mic every drum and then carefully adjust levels, which just, holy crud, I can't do that) in order to get even the most basic sound. And the process for converting live drums to output MIDI (something I do want someday) sounded complicated.

Would anyone know-- what are my options here? What should I look out for? How much should I expect to pay? Will I get something significantly different/better depending on what price point I'm aiming at? My current plan is to stumble into some music stores and ask them what they have.

[MoritzPGKatz]

Hello,

My current plan is to stumble into some music stores and ask them what they have.

Probably a good idea!
Can't hurt to gather some information before-hand, though.

Roland is considered the standard when it comes to e-drumming. You'll have to plan in at least USD 600, though, and I don't know whether the cheapest model (Roland HD-1) is okay for the price or not.
Some stores like Thomann also sell e-drums of their own brand, but again I can't say if they're okay regarding response etc.
Regarding MIDI, most drum sets have a MIDI out on their sound modules nowadays while the triggers connect to that with TRS cables sending CV (control voltage). I'd be careful and check that, though: if the module has no MIDI out, you'll have to buy a convertor, there are models by Alesis and Roland which work equally well.

An alternative would be to go for a drum pad like the Roland Octapad or the new SPD-SX (you can probably get the old SPD-S pretty cheap now on eBay etc.) - you could also go for the Alesis Peformance Pad which is quite cheap too and has a MIDI out.
You can still connect triggers for Kick and Hi-Hat and it won't take away as much space and will be more portable.

Anyway. Even if you buy the priciest Roland set, there's still a huge difference to real acoustic drums. Although there are good sampling instruments like Addictive Drums which can sound pretty convincing in context, it's not the same for a huge number of reasons, even with the multiple pressure points on the modern Roland mesh heads and cymbals, there's just too much detail to playing the drums that can't be captured by sampling (yet?).

Hope that helped? Any further detailed questions, don't hesitate asking.

Cheers,
Moritz

[Halcyon]

Hey, I have been playing drums for around 2 years now and these days I play on an acoustic kit, but I started off with an e-kit (which I used for about 1.5 years) so I have some experience with them.

Firstly if you main purpose is to record midi, or sounds with them then an e-kit is certainly the easiest way to go. It is true that an e-kit will not have the same experience, dynamics and sound of an acoustic kit though. That said there are great drum sample programs that you can buy and use a midi controller (e-kit) to control with, some such as addictive drums, EZ drummer and superior drums (there are more also); you can find videos of how they sound on Youtube.

For the kit itself, as you are mainly using it as just a midi controller you can get away with a cheapish kit, or even use pads or a midi keyboard if you'd like, but if you want to fully trigger the samples with its full dynamic range you are going to want a decent kit with good velocity sensitive triggering and if possible positional triggering. Higher end Roland kits have these features, often with the mesh heads being the best, but e-kits are quite expensive (you can easily pay 10,000 for one over here in Australia at least). There are other options such as the Alesis DM10 though it does not come with mesh pads and only has velocity sensitivity, you can do a relatively easy and cheap mesh head conversion for them though.

You can expect to budget at least a thousand for a decent e-kit, I would look for mesh heads, velocity sensitive, Midi (Obviously), and good built quality; Roland are indeed the industry standard in this regard also. Brands to research are Roland (TD4 at least), Alesis (DM10 or DM8), Yamaha(DTX, they don't use mesh heads though the more expensive models use a silicon pad which is supposedly better) and perhaps 2box (Drumit five).

Hope that helps in some way and also feel free to ask more questions.

[PaulForey]

A year or so ago I bought an Alesis USB Pro electronic drum kit (http://www.alesis.com/usbprodrumkit).

I originally bought it so that I could keep up my drumming without annoying the neighbours. It actually makes more noise than you'd think, but they seemed fine with it as long as I didn't drum too much or keep drumming late at night. Being an e-drum kit, it obviously didn't feel any where near as good as a real one, but mine didn't have mesh pads. The cymbals are great on it though (being real metal but with a plastic coating on the bottom to deaden them).

I went for the USB Pro because that doesn't have any built-in sounds with it (I already have lots of drum samples on my computer and I didn't feel like wasting money on more of them). It just has a USB MIDI like any modern MIDI controller keyboard.

What I would say to watch out for is the audio latency on your computer, and the program you use to control the samples. I tried both Reason 5 (with the Drums refill) and Native Instruments' Battery 3 and was never that happy with either, as they lacked decent support for the hi-hat pedal etc. I'm sure there are complicated ways you can set them up to improve such a thing, but honestly I never bothered. On the latency front, you should be fine if you're using a Mac, but if you're using a PC make sure you're using ASIO audio drivers, either by using ASIO4ALL or a decent professional sound card (I use a Presonus Firebox). Preferably you want less than 10ms of latency from you hitting the drum until you hear the drum sample. I set my audio card to 6ms latency, and that works fine.

tl;dr: E-drum kits don't feel great. If you're using pure USB or MIDI to your computer make sure you have a good host program and low audio latency.

You mentioned that you don't actually know how to play the drums. Bear in mind that it might take a while for your drumming to improve so that it sounds better than programming them in. Fake drums sound better than bad drums Of course the real beauty of MIDI is being able to edit the notes after you've played them. Check out pages 79 to 81 in the Battery 3 Manual for some interesting tips: http://www.native-instruments.com/fileadmin/ni_media/downloads/manuals/Battery_3_Manual_English.pdf

[mcc]

Thanks all for the fantastic advice all, this was very helpful.

I visited some music stores this weekend and I think I'm going to try to go with a low end Roland TD-4K2. This might be overkill for my needs but I tried a couple different kits and I really liked the way this one felt. I'm also a little bit wanting to get something that won't start to feel limiting if I get more serious about this. I'm excited about this :D (The alesis looks damn tempting though... USB out would be convenient.)

I've tried the pads at stores a number of time, and really they just feel very awkward to play to me, also they're oddly not much less expensive than the kits it seems like.

Anyway. Even if you buy the priciest Roland set, there's still a huge difference to real acoustic drums.

Yeah, I definitely understand. If I went with an e-kit my assumption is I'll be focusing on making more electronic or stylized sounds instead of trying to mimic something acoustic.

One more random question. I'm curious about this 'positional information' thing. Roland's kits seem to have some black plastic head drums and some white mesh head drums ("v-drums"). Do both, neither of these head types have the positional information? Is this information that gets passed through in MIDI? I used to write a lot of MIDI VSTs and I'm interested in getting back into it, I was wondering how much of the positional information would be visible to software I wrote.