popeye Posted January 1, 2002 Share Posted January 1, 2002 Greetings, I play bass in our church group but make the recommendations re: equipment upgrades. Last night we had a visiting band, the drummer had an electronic kit. The benefits seemed obvious to me, it sounded great and the potential to reduce the stage volume, but please bombard me with your thoughts and opinions as to why we should replace the acoustic kit (which BTW is only mic'd with a single mic right now...small room, approx 40x70, drum micing almost not needed) with electronic. What do these rigs cost, etc etc. Regards, Popeye [ 01-01-2002: Message edited by: popeye ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaddabout Posted January 2, 2002 Share Posted January 2, 2002 Originally posted by popeye: Greetings, I play bass in our church group but make the recommendations re: equipment upgrades. Last night we had a visiting band, the drummer had an electronic kit. The benefits seemed obvious to me, it sounded great and the potential to reduce the stage volume, but please bombard me with your thoughts and opinions as to why we should replace the acoustic kit (which BTW is only mic'd with a single mic right now...small room, approx 40x70, drum micing almost not needed) with electronic. What do these rigs cost, etc etc. Regards, Popeye [ 01-01-2002: Message edited by: popeye ] Unless you're a big church with a great sound system, I'd advise against it. Not only will it cost some bucks to get the drums amped and mixed into the system, you might be surprised how important that "stage noise" is when the small monitors on the stage don't adequately match drums to the music. For example, if you lost the "thump" from the bass drum from behind you, would it impact the music? I think so. Electronic drums can range anywhere between $500 on the low end to $5,000 on the high end. Roland makes a nice professional kit that can be picked up for around $3,400. It really depends what you want the drummer to play. The cost of an e-kit is in direct relation to the sensitivity of the triggers and technology in the system's brain. The less expensive, the more likely you're going to get a kit that doesn't respond to a light touch, doesn't track every note in a sextuplet, or provide a lot of realistic drum sounds. You say you play in a small room. My own personal opinion is e-drums are best utilized in a big room or stadium where the sound systems are designed to put out that kind of power. They also work well in the studio, where the technology can lend a lot of help to post-production. If the drummer is playing too loud, it's not the kit, it's the drummer. There's no magic drum kit that will allow a loud drummer to play soft without changing what he's doing, and that seems to me to be the primary motivation for most churches to by electronic kits. All that said, if you already have a nice sound system, adequate ampage, adequate stage monitors, and you want some great sounding drums that only need one board input and no mics, a nice e-kit could be a great way to go for a church. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
popeye Posted January 2, 2002 Author Share Posted January 2, 2002 Gaddabout, thanks for a balanced perspective. We've basically got 2 acoustic guitars (sometimes one), one electric guitar, bass, drums, and keys (+ the usual smattering of ancillary sources and FX), plus 2 vocalists. The three guitarists also add vocals. Mix is via Mackie SR 32-4 (w/6 auxes). Plenty of Yamaha power for the mains, driving a 15+horn and 12+horn on each side of the room, ie 4 bins total. I sweep the room with a Goldline occasionally and FOH EQ's are optimized. Monitors are CGM 12+horn. There are 2 wedges for the guitar section, one each for the lead vocalists, and one for bass. Drummer wears cans. Keys has his own powered hot spot, tapped off the vocalists monitor amp line out. Vocals, guitars, and bass all have their own serparate monitor mixes. There's roughly 200W each available to all three monitor mixes. I think we're only using a fraction of it, overall stage levels are kept under control. Vocal and guitar monitors each have 31 band EQ; these I simply rung out and did not bother sweeping with noise as with the mains. As there is ample monitoring, I think the e-drums would be a fit. It would surely reduce the drums stage volume, and get more of a robust drum mix out to the house. Right now there's 8 spare channels on the board...an option is to mic the rest of the existing kit, but that could be money spent toward the e-alternative. I'll have to find out what this guy last night had. They really sounded good. On the other hand, so does a well mic'd kit. Decisions decisions...arghhh. Regards, Popeye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaddabout Posted January 3, 2002 Share Posted January 3, 2002 Something else you need to consider is, if you go with an e-kit, are you also going to replace the cymbals? This can be a frustrating thing for drummers. Not only are the sounds problematic with sustain, it's a pain in the neck hitting a pad when you're thinking about hitting cymbal. It's just a different technique. And you can't do any cymbal crescendos or ride cymbal bell hits without stopping and changing the pad setting (unless you have them triggered, which another headache all its own, and not worth the trouble for what you're talking about). One of our sister churches, North Phoenix Vineyard (http://www.vcfnp.com) went with a nice Roland kit, but kept their cymbals ... I think they only use one Sonnheiser for the cymbals, but I remember being very impressed with their drum sound. Might want to e-mail someone up there and see what they do. If you do go with an e-kit, let your drummer play it first. He or she should be able to tell you some of the things about playing the kit the salesman may or may not tell you. For example, if the drummer wants to play softly, do the pads track with a light touch? And do they actually respond to dynamics, or is there only one volume setting regardless of stroke? [ 01-02-2002: Message edited by: Gaddabout ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zorro Posted January 3, 2002 Share Posted January 3, 2002 I use E drums for and have a JBL Eon-2 for a monitor. That way I get the thump of the kick coming at me. The Roland kits seem good. They play loud or soft depending how hard you hit them. Their is rubber pads or silent mesh pads. The silent mesh pads are very quiet, feel real and responsive. I use silent mesh. They cost more than the rubber pads. Yamaha's DTXtreem are a great sounding kit also. Any of the Alesis drum modules, with pads work very well. I use the Alesis D-5 and Dm Pro in a rack with mixer, EQ, compressor, Behringer enhancer with big bottom and DBX noise gates. It a bit more than the usual drummer has but that's just me. A good drum module with decient pads should work. I use regular cymbals, but seen the electric ones used. I may switch to that later but using real cymbals for now. It lessons stage volume, but I add it again with my JBL, but it's more controlled than acoustic drums, and sound great. Try vdrums.com or ddrums.com for extra info. The best E Drums are the d drums, but Roland work nicely. I prefer Alesis as my favorite. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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