Childhood and music
I used to play piano as a child, but I had difficult learning it to the point I had to use color-coded notes. Later on, around the 7th grade, I picked up the classical guitar, but due to lack of interest by myself and a not so meaningful selection of songs to learn from my teacher and what not, I ended up dropping those instruments (I also envied my brother who had an electric guitar lol).
These instruments felt quite complicated to me, like I had to learn a decent amount of musical concepts and theory to be able to do something with them. The guitar in specific, I was able to play quite a few songs, but I also had problems with my hands getting hurt or tired quickly.
So at one point, near the end of my time with the guitar, I even asked my teacher to have him teach me drums, initially just out of curiosity, but I was very eager to like it and have it replace the guitar as my instrument of choice.
Eventually I stopped having classes altogether (it was a messy time) and since then I hadn’t touched any instruments again.
E-drums
Since high school, and especially since the start of my time at university (which is when I made a lastfm account lol) I have been more and more into music as a whole, and have made friends with people that are also really into music and play some instruments. Eventually, around Aug 2024, due to peer pressure, exposure to youtube shorts and instagram reels, I got interested in acquiring e-drums.
So let’s go through their positive and negative aspects.
Positive aspects…
-
E-drums are feature-rich You can connect them directly to a computer with a USB-B cable, which allows you to record your playing and change the drum sounds completely. Traditional drums can also be made into MIDI players through additional equipment, but that surely becomes more expensive. This proved quite interesting to me (in my reels exposure arc) because it meant I could use them to play Clone Hero and YARG, which are free rhythm game clones of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, respectively.
-
E-drums are great for apartments I live in an apartment with quite thin (or not very dense) walls, which is a real problem to me not only because I have neighbors in front and below me, but also because I live with 2 people that are quite easily irritable to noise. Not only that, but my apartment, while relatively large, is by no means a residence with loads of space to spare, and usually traditional drums take a decent amount of space. Taking into account my living situation, e-drums fair much better because they’re often targeted at beginners, so children or teenagers, meaning they are smaller, but they also don’t produce the actual sound of the cymbals and pads. For that, you either hook them up to external speakers or use headphones. Take into account that this doesn’t mean e-drums are perfectly silent. When playing them, you’re essentially hitting wood (stick) into rubber (cymbals) or fabric mesh (pads). The meshes are, largely, fairly silent but the rubber is definitely audible. The pedals can also make a decent amount of noise, especially if you’re a newbie like myself who doesn’t have great feet placement or force control.
-
E-drums are fairly accessible! I got really excited to know that a lot of e-drums are actually marketed towards beginners and offered at accessible prices. This is especially true if you browse the second-hand market. In my limited market experience, I was able to find several models, even some fairly expensive ones, at half or a quarter of their original price.
For the negatives…
- More to think of Drums are cool to me because there’s less to think about, at least initially, it’s just like, hit the thing at the right beat. But having to setup software, patches, fixes, cables, and having to consider model limitations and features, etc., makes it all a bit more complicated.
There’s more that I could add to the negatives, but that’s the main idea (It’s also getting quite late as of writing).
Alesis Turbo Mesh
Review
The kit I ended up buying was the Alesis Turbo Mesh. It comes with a snare, hi-hat, 3 toms, a crash, ride and the kick and hi-hat pedals. I got it second-hand for about 100 euros and I only had to drive about 10 minutes to get to the seller.
Regarding my specific e-drum kit, it definitely does not feel like it’s worth more than what I paid for in terms of features and quality, but it is perhaps precisely the right one for a beginner like myself.
My gripes with it are:
- You can’t pinch the cymbals to cut off the sound like you can in more expensive models;
- The pads have a large raised plastic rim around them, but that serves no actual purpose (it doesn’t play a different rim sound). This rim is can become frustrating to deal with because it’s very easy to hit by mistake, making a very loud noise;
- All the cables from the various instruments are grouped into a single cable that connects to the drum module and, if damaged, needs to be replaced as a whole;
- The pedals are simple and limited, causing some miss triggers and dead notes. It’s also a shame not being able to use double pedals;
- The drum module is severely limited. It does not offer the ability to change the sensitivity of any of the pads or cymbals, does not offer the ability to change the volume per pads and cymbals (only master volume knob), has a small selection of drum-kit sounds and would probably be refuse to work in combination with additional pads.
Linux/NixOS fixes
However, most of these are constraints that can be expected considering the price. But there is one problem that I do not dismiss as reasonable cost-cutting. For whatever reason, the closed hi-hat MIDI note produced by the module is the same as the open hi-hat. Fortunately, there is a mididings script made by a fellow Linux user that solves this, and in Windows it appears you can easily solve this with EZdrummer.
I uploaded my flake development shell and nix configuration for getting the audio working to Github. The flake includes Hydrogen, the drum sequencer software for actually making sense of the MIDI notes and all that, and several libraries and dependencies for mididings, the python package for remapping MIDI notes. Additionaly, specifically in NixOS, JACK clients are not working with Pipewire by default, so this flake also fixes that. To run mididings, I use a python virtual environment.
I do not have previous advanced experience with audio in Linux, despite having some bad headaches with a laptop before, and ever since Pipewire became a thing, it’s mostly been smooth sailing. But this means I do NOT understand how stuff like JACK work, so even though there have been people doing almost exactly what I was trying to do, this was all still quite frustrating (especially with the added complications trying to run mididings).
If you use this flake however, you should be able to run the shell script mentioned before without issues. The only additional changes I made to the script were
removing the Hydrogen song provided, perhaps commenting out the reverb changes,
and commenting out the renice (because it requires sudo and that was proving to
be a headache).
After running the script, also configure Hydrogen to “Ignore note-off” and use MIDI Output as MIDI Input/Note (?), and change the MIDI System’s MIDI ports to mididings’ own ports. You can use QJackctl to verify in the graph that the connections are correct (the drums should be connected to mididings, which is in turn connected to Hydrogen).
Opening up the pedals by taking a few screws out allows us to remove any dust and clean them a little bit, which reduces the miss triggers and dead notes. I also followed a guide, made by the same guy that provided the mentioned scripts, to dampen the noise made by the pedals.
As of now, I feel relatively happy with my setup. I’m still considering whether or not I should purchase a subscription for Songsterr to isolate each instrument, but overall I don’t have complaints.
That basically wraps it up. I just felt like ranting about my experience and opinions regarding my drumming experience and my little scripts for fixing my kit’s problems and so on. I plan to continue drumming regularly for the foreseeable future, so I might even make a follow up post.