Bought an E-Kit and having a blast!
I'm sure many of you here saw the post about the community group I'm a part of, where we set up rock band in our hometown centre for people to play for five minutes of fun!
I used to play RB drums on Expert, to the point where I got a splitter & second pedal to be able to play some of the harder songs to a high level, and that day sparked something in me...
On a whim I bought an Alesis Nitro Pro E-Kit a couple of weeks ago and started playing Pro Drums on RB4. I must say... What an incredible learning curve it's been!!
With the prior experience on the regular 4 tom drums, I can quite comfortably get through most 3 spot difficulty songs on expert, but have also managed some 5 spot difficulty (mostly heavy use of bass pedal) songs, and Soundgardens "Spoonman" is definitely the most impressive looking chart I can get through on pro Drums Expert.
The fact I've not instantly become good at it is great and leaves so much room for improvement that it's enjoyable!
The transition between 4 toms vs 4 toms 3 cymbals is way bigger than you'd think. Being used to four pads you'd think they'd be the easy part, but no. Apparently most of the time you'll be hitting cymbals with the odd roll being toms... And that's very disorientating.
What I've learnt is;
- The positioning of your Toms/ Cymbals is important. You can't just whack huge pads blindly like you can with the original RB drum kit.
- Being sat at the correct height, also really important, but also really annoying that Drum Thrones cost so much.
- It's very difficult to switch between Cymbal note and Tom note of the same colour in your brain.
- Rolls on a kit that has real world rebound are wayyyyyy different than the no rebound original RB drums.
- A real kick pedal with chain makes faster paced kicks much, much easier!
There's probably a ton I'm missing out on, but just wanted to ramble for a bit and give my experience of the switch from regular 4 pad RB drums to an E-Kit. If you ever wondered whether to make the move or not, just do it.