In this section we’ll talk about why you would consider purchasing an Electronic drum kit. You may want a complete kit or just some pads and/or triggers and a module to compliment your acoustic kit.

Either way, Electronic drums are easier to use and sound better than ever before so if you had a bad experience in the 80’s or have been nervous about exploring the world of Electronic percussion we’ll put your mind at rest here.

One
If you have a situation where you want to play but acoustic drums are just too loud then an Electronic kit is for you. The great thing about an E-Kit is that you can play any time of the day without disturbing anyone by listening to the kit through headphones. E-Kits are ideal for apartment dwellers, or if you live in an area where the houses are close together. In a live performance where stage volume is an issue an E-kit is ideal because they make very little noise and you can easily control the overall volume.

Church auditoriums are an ideal environment for Electronic drums because they are generally designed to project the human voice. Acoustic drums are often too loud in Church auditoriums, even when using a clear acrylic screen in front.

Two
Electronic drums give you a broad pallet of sounds to create with. You have hundreds of snares, toms, kicks, and cymbals as well as special effects and World/Ethnic percussion voices. All of these are contained in a box that weighs a couple of pounds, for a fraction of the cost of owing all of those instruments. There is a vast selection of recorded sounds called “samples” that you can buy that can be loaded into our flag ship kit the DTXTREME IIS, and you can even download samples from the internet or record your own samples right into the module.

With an Electronic kit you can stack multiple voices on top of each other on a single pad to create complex voices. If you prefer the look and feel of an acoustic kit you can attach triggers to them and play the sounds in a module from your kit. You can also blend the sound of your acoustic kit with the triggered sounds for even more variety.

Three
Electronic drums are great learning tools. Arguably the most important skill for a drummer to learn is keeping good time. All Yamaha E-Kits have a built in metronome that gives you a steady tempo to practice with and the Groove Check feature will show you how close you are to playing on the beat. Another important skill is to learn the appropriate “groove” for a particular style of music.

The internal sequencer has pre-recorded songs in many styles that you can play along with so that you can master the nuances of virtually any style of music. You can record your playing so that you can listen back to it and critique yourself. This is very useful when you are taking lessons and you want to hear your progress. The sequencer in the DTXTREME IIS will even let you build a drum part one instrument at a time so that you can study the relationship between each drum in a groove and how the dynamics of each voice affect the overall feel of a song.

Four
Electronic drums are much easier to record that their acoustic counterparts. Recording acoustic drums requires several microphones, stands, and cables. The placement of the mics and tuning of the drums is critical to getting a great drum sound. This takes years to master and requires a room large enough to set up the kit and the material that the floors, walls and ceilings are covered with have a dramatic effect on the sound. An electronic kit takes most of the hassles away from getting a great drum sound.

For simple recording in your home project studio you can run two lines out from the module to your recording device. On The DTXTREME IIS, you have the option of sending the kit to six individual outputs giving you more control over the mix. You can record the drums raw or use the onboard effects and the room acoustics won’t matter. Tuning is much easier because you aren’t dealing with multiple tuning points on each drum; it’s all done with the push of a button.

Once the pitch is set where you want it, they won’t go out of tune. You can also change kits in the middle of a song and switch back to the original kit again by hitting a pad or a footswitch. Electronic percussion also gives you access to many more voices than an acoustic kit. You have many drum and percussion voices as well as special effects. Sampling gives you access to virtually any sound that can be heard by the human ear, and you can even trigger keyboard and other melodic instrument voices