Electronic Drum - Recent Innovations

Recent Innovations

Newer drum kits have addressed many of the shortcomings of early electronic drums. While each of the manufacturers have entry-level units, the professional kits are geared toward creating a sound and playing experience that is nearly indistinguishable from a quality acoustic kit. Examples include the Yamaha DTXtreme and Roland V-Drums TD-20. Typically, these high-end kits are equipped with:

• High quality digital sounds - These modules offer high quality modeled drum sounds with thousands of sounds to choose. Some modules let the user choose the tune, size and material of drums and cymbals. They also simulate effects like muffling, microphone position and ambient acoustic.

• Positional sensing and dynamic impact detection - The module can detect which area of the drum head is impacted, and provide a sample representative of that strike on an acoustic head. Additionally, the volume and timbre of the strike is dependent on the velocity of the impact.

• Multiple triggers - Snares and toms have impact zones for both the head and the rim, allowing for rim and cross shots as well as shell tapping. Cymbals can accommodate zones for edge, bow and bell strikes, with choking capability.

• Realistic Hi-hats - These are mounted on standard stands, and allow for actual opened and closed foot playing. An electronic module within the unit detects its movement and provides variations of opened, partially opened, and closed hi-hat hits. It also features foot close and quick close-open sound.

• Multiple outputs - These modules have multiple outputs to the sound board such that each percussion group (i.e. toms, cymbals, etc.) can be independently mixed (like the multiple miking of an acoustic kit). Additionally, these groups have independent volume faders on the module to fine tune volume settings for each group. Another common used output is the MIDI connection, which send signals to a computer based specialist software. The increased processing power provided by this option allows the user to utilize actual, randomized samples of professionally recorded drums. The result is a phenomenally credible nuance and, by many accounts, an indistinguishable replacement for traditionally recorded drum.