Should I Buy an Electronic Drum Kit or Learn to Program Drums on Superior's Grid Editor?

Rocco Crocco

Rocco Crocco

Roadie
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I am a hack, but I can play the drums a little. Programming from scratch on SD3's grid editor is very tedious and boring. I am sure if I just keep doing it, I will get better/faster at it, but I feel like programming drums sucks the life out of me. Sometimes I can used whatever drum MIDI I have in the SD3 library and tweak the beats to fit the song, but often there is no good drum MIDI options that fit the song I am working on.

Guitar Center has an Alesis Nitro Mesh kit on sale for $400 and I am considering buying it. I am thinking I could record the electronic kit to MIDI in my DAW, then use the grid editor to make tweaks.

Looking for anyone's thought or experience with programming drums vs. an electronic kit.
 
Ultimately, physically playing will teach you a lot when it comes to programming, so I’d say go for the kit, especially if you already have SD3, you can modify the sh*t out of the MIDI tracks after the fact. The more you learn to physically play, the more the programming side of things will make sense. Win/win!!
 
Hijacking thread. I don't have room for an actual kit but would love to play drums with something better than a MIDI keyboard or those stupid finger pad controllers. I hate how they feel.

Has anyone made an actually decent desktop drum kit type thing you could play with sticks, but you know, without all the space taken by a typical electric kit (even if you can fold some away)? I remember Yamaha and a few others had something way back in the day but afaik they were not particularly good.
 
I agree that both are good.

If you can't play that well, you'll end up quantising everything anyway, and then at a certain level you'll start moving things to introduce groove/ humanisation, so you almost might as well have just clicked every hit in to the grid.

On the other hand, if you can't play well, having to play an actual electric kit will improve your timekeeping, and develop your taste for parts. It can also be really handy in identifying what it is about a groove that makes it sound great - you can see that, say, the snare being slightly late, or the first kick of the bar being slightly early, are important for the feel of the track, in a way that's more intuitive than having to sit staring at a grid and trying to guess where you can will some life and soul into it.
 
Buying the kit is a solid idea. I need to finish setting mine up.

I hate programming drums, but I got a little better at it working on some songs this year. I use the Logic Drummer to get in the ballpark, then copy to a MIDI track and make some manual tweaks/edits. It's not fun but it's a lot less pain than doing everything by hand. Then I add whatever sounds I want in EZ Drummer or whatever.
 
My game stepped up with an Akai MPD 226. Way better than hunt and peck keyboard.
 
Necropost, but for anyone looking to put together an E-kit solution, you should be looking at EDrumin.

I’ve used the EDrumin10 for a couple years now and it’s an incredible module that opens up many options. It works with most pads and supports advanced features like positional sensing.

I initially started my journey with an acoustic kit I converted over to mesh heads and triggers.

IMG_0819.jpeg


That was actually my favorite kit to play because the full size shells felt more authentic to play, especially the kick and snare. Unfortunately, the triggers liked to move around a lot and I grew annoyed having to adjust triggers at the worst possible moments.

I bit the bullet and pieced together a kit using mostly Roland PD-105 and PD-125 pads with a mixture of Roland, Yamaha, and Lemon E-Cymbals. This kit has been more stable even though it’s not quite as cool and vibey as the acoustic conversion kit.

IMG_1513.jpeg
 
I also pieced together an ekit with a traditional-ish look and feel. I used parts from Pearl, EFNote, Hart and Alesis. This was a great investment for my studio.


 
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