|
Once upon a time, I used to be a drummer in a band. Once you’ve owned drums you kind of get bitten by the drumming bug, and since my last drum kit was destroyed by fire I decided to take a look and see what was out there for a reasonable price.
I also wanted something that wasn’t too large so I could leave it permanently set up in my house. Initially I looked at various compact drum kits including a ‘cocktail’ drum kit - however these are even more expensive than normal acoustic stage drum kits. Another issue with drums is that they are very loud, really too loud to play indoors unless you have a soundproofed practice room. This was the main reason that I considered an electric drum kit this time around, as well as portability should I ever wish to use them live. There are many makes of electric drums about on the market today, the most well know being Roland VDrums, the cheapest set of which costs around £500 upwards. As I wanted to use the kit to practice with mostly, I didn’t want something that was too unlike a real kit to play on – some of the higher end electric kits have ‘real drum heads’, but the ones within my budget range generally seemed to have rubber pads to hit which aren’t like a real drum kit at all.  After much shopping about, I came across the Alesis DM5 Pro electric drum kit. Alesis make several electric drum kits, the lowest in the range being the Alesis Ion series, followed by the Alesis DM5, and then the DM5 Pro. The main difference being that the DM5 Pro has ‘real drum heads’, which actually have drum head hoops with adjusters and actual drum skins for all the drum pads. The lowest end Roland VDrum set has a real drum head only for the snare - the rest of the pads being rubber. The hardware consists of a sturdy metal tubular frame to hold the four drum heads and three cymbal pads as well as the DM5 1U rack mount unit itself. The bass pedal actually hits another drum head which is more like hitting an actual bass drum that a switch pedal found on cheaper electric kits. This is mounted on a floor standing unit with spikes underneath to stop it slipping, as well as bracing legs similar to those found on a real bass drum. The hi-hat pedal is also fairly sturdy and is of mostly metal construction. You will need to buy a bass pedal, drum stool and sticks as these are not included with the DM5 Pro kit as standard. This is due to the wide variety of available items and the preferences of many drummers. 
The DM5 drum brain is a 1U rack mount unit which has its own hardware for mounting on the drum frame. The main features of this include 4 audio outputs, 12 trigger inputs – so plenty of space for expansion with additional pads, over 500 individual drums sounds which can be assigned to custom kits, as well as the 20 pre configured kits that are there by default, 16 voice polyphony, 48Khz Sample rate, 18 Bit DAC, and 7 position stereo panning.  The DM5 drum brain also has MIDI in/out/through jacks, so you could use this kit to record a MIDI sequence or trigger sounds from a sampler, keyboard or computer etc. My personal plan for recording the drums is to record the a MIDI sequence into my computer, adjust any errors, then get the computer to play the drum sounds either from the DM5 brain or from other samples. I then record the sounds as several audio tracks so they can be mixed independently later on. Overall the kit plays well and sounds almost like a real drum kit. Of course you can play through headphones for practicing which means that the times and places that you can play are a lot more flexible. For the price there is almost no contest between the Alesis DM5 Pro and competing products.
|
