Studio series II – drums

Here’s the drum kit – mostly I use this for practice and laying down scratch rhythm tracks in Sonar. Hart Dynamics Giga Pro, with a DW-5000 kick pedal.

It drives a Roland TD-10 module. The TD-10 sounds pretty good, but the output is fairly low and can’t really stand up to other instruments without some preamp on the way in.

A couple of things make this stand out for an electronic kit. The heads are all mesh, not plastic, which makes for a much more realistic response. It’s still a little different than a set of acoustic heads, but it doesn’t take nearly as much adjustment as the hard-rubber kits.

The snare is especially nice – if you spend the time to dial it in with the TD-10, you can get damn close to the response and feel of the real thing. The snare closed the deal for me – I didn’t think I could live with an electronic kit until I ran into this.

The hi-hat and ride are both brass (although slightly heavier than the real deal). They provide a nice familiar feel (if a little loud when the kids are sleeping) and fairly realistic force-feedback. That makes a huge difference compared to beating on a plastic bar with a lot of other e-kits to keep time 😉