Good budget E-kit?

[Jacksonluvr636]

I have SD3 and am looking to record some songs. I want an electronic kit so I can just play most of the beast vs programming them.

I have not looked at any of these in years but what should I be looking at? Would like something cheap but effective. Maybe under $500

 

[TonyFlyingSquirrel]

The Alesis one is good, but even the Simmons cheapo kit work to basically generate midi that you can use with any drum sampler.

 

[Rizzo]

Honestly, for an e-kit, budget =/= good.
Spend as much as you can, or you'll soon find yourself with stupid trigger assignments, non-sensitive head pads and such problems that will get you to fine tune everything you tracked by hand all over again just as you didn't even have an e-kit in the first place. Rolands and Yamahas are the best ones.

 

[Andrew Lloyd Webber]

+1. I bought an Alesia DM10 eight years ago, still use it, and still wish I’d bought a smaller Roland kit for the same price, instead. When it comes to e-kits, the sole point of quality needed is for them to just work.

With other kits, you’ll find yourself banging your head against slipping clamps, tangled leads, intermittent trigger issues, and more time spent trying to dial in an inspiring sound than playing. I don’t drum much these days, but know an e-kit of sufficient quality that I can just sit down and play into a DAW without muss or fuss would make all the difference.

 

[bostjan]

+1 more.

The only e-kits that I've found passable are the ones that cost over $700. I've rigged an e-kit out of Rock Band drums and a freeware USB drum module program, and, well, it was just as shitty as my buddy's $600 Alesis e-kit, and marginally better than my band mate's $500 Yamaha e-kit.

A lot of the trouble is in the design. Your e-kit is trying to understand when you are hitting a pad, so it uses a piezoelectric sensor inside of the bad that detects a change in force. The trouble is that when you hit your e-snare, the vibration travels through the stand, and, most likely, the stand is also holding up other sensors, which will also see a change in force due to that vibration. So, the drum module tries to gate out the unintended vibration, but that decreases the sensitivity of everything, so it compromises by not gating as much as it ideally should, resulting in some loss of dynamics with a small propensity for errors. If you put each sensor on it's own stand, you alleviate a lot of the trouble, but there is still vibration that travels through the floor, so it's never going to be perfect. The expensive e-kits have nicer pads and nicer hardware, but really, they use the same sensors at the cheap kits. Of course, a piezoelectric disk costs the OEM about ten cents, which is a lot less than the housing, the stand, or even the mess of wires to connect everything nicely.

All that said, if you are going to just bash on something and then edit the ever-loving hell out of it to make a nice drum track, I suggest you go the same route I ended up doing, and just get a couple cheapo Rock Band/Guitar Hero drum kits off of eBay, download a freeware program to log MIDI off of them, and then go to town recording what you want, then spend 100+ hours editing the timing and velocity of each hit anyway. It'll take just as much time as it would have (probably) as if you just entered the drum program with a keyboard and mouse, but you still get to feel more personally connected to the drum patterns, since you actually played them (sort of) on a drum kit (not really).

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Check larger local music stores. Folks buy e-kits all the time for thier kids or because they think they want to learn drums or that they'll be dead quiet or something, then realize how wrong they are, can't sell them themselves, and dump them at Guitar Center.

 

[Jacksonluvr636]

Thanks for the replies, I figured it would be too good to be true haha.

 

[Randy]

I had an Alesis DM5 kit, which was one of those ones with metal hardware, rubber rims and the mylar heads that can be swapped for mesh. As far as the drums themselves, they had the feel of something in the $1000+ range. I paid and resold them for under $300 on Reverb, shipped.