E-drums: could they be a common thing for small bands gigs?

[Mikael Dez]

If I was gigging covers regularly at venues with a good sound system, or in a band that had a good PA and mix engineer I would totally use a high-end e-kit. I much prefer a real kit for practicing or recording in my home studio.

Space Pickle

The Prophesied Savior of TGF

 

[paisleywookiee]

There’s been plenty of examples of reputable pro drummers using ekits in this thread



…..


Can anyone name a single iconic drummer using an ekit ?????



I’ll wait

The guy from Def Leppard, and Rick Allen…wait no that IS the guy from Def Leppard…yeah no I got nothing.

 

[OneEng]

If I was gigging covers regularly at venues with a good sound system, or in a band that had a good PA and mix engineer I would totally use a high-end e-kit. I much prefer a real kit for practicing or recording in my home studio.

Great point.

For eDrums to sound good, you are very dependent on the quality of the PA..... the subs in particular, but really just a good PA all around. Since I have had a good PA since the early 90's, I tend to forget that there are plenty of bands out there doing a "vocals only" PA that can't really push anything else through the PA (and sometimes the vocals can't even get above the band with these setups).

Just out of curiosity, where is your line in the sand for "high end e-kit" today?

 

[toneseeker911]

They sound quite good, and the MAJORITY (not all) of bands that use eDrums sound better using them because many drummers don't control their volume well with acoustic drums

Been the opposite in my experience. I have heard a handful of bands doing e-drums. Sounded terrible, especially the machine gun toms and cymbals.

If you only have terrible drummers around that can’t have any sort of control over the kit, they’d sound bad on an ekit too, probably maxing the velocity to 127 on every hit.

 

[OneEng]

If you only have terrible drummers around that can’t have any sort of control over the kit, they’d sound bad on an ekit too, probably maxing the velocity to 127 on every hit.

Granted that in both cases, the drummer lacks talent and hurts the mix. The difference is that he hurts the mix WAY more with an acoustic kit than he does with the eDrum kit since his lack of finesse on eDrums don't overpower the vocals .... they simply lack any dynamics. Still not good, but WAY less damaging that covering up the vocals (in most genres. Note, the recording posted a page or so ago had a vocal that was more of a growl than a vocal and was pretty much buried in the mix as more seasoning that the main course.

Given a heavy hitting drummer (most of them I have worked with), less damage is done with eDrums.