Donner DED-80 Electric Drum Kit, Electronic Drum Sets for Beginner with 4 Quiet Mesh Drum Pads, 2 Switch Pedal, 180+ Sounds, Throne, On-Ear Headphones, Sticks, and Melodics Lessons Included Black

Product Information

Other essentials include a drum seat, or “throne.” This should be height-adjustable, especially if you’re buying for a young learner who needs room to grow into their new instrument. Headphones are another must for training purposes with an electronic drum kit, and ideally you’ll want these to be the full-size type with ear coverings. (You want to hear the synthesized sound of your drumming, not the actual hits on the mesh heads.) Once players graduate to gigs or jam sessions, an amp will be another must. Just make sure it’s compatible with your output type. This was a fully turn key set, and included everything you need to start out. We first put together the stool, which was really straight forward, and actually pretty sturdy. Even though it’s ultimately designed for kids, it still felt pretty solid under 250lb of adult drummer. Hi-hat, and hi-hat control is great! It sounds and feels good, with a more expressive open-hat then the Alesis Nitro Mesh.

I really can't get over the quality of the drum pedal included in this kit, at least for my needs. It's very responsive.Overall, I was quite happy with the product. The frame is relatively sturdy, the mesh heads are holding up well, the brain is good, and the tower is not bad. I would highly recommend this to a beginner or even an intermediate drummer that wants an inexpensive practice tool or a way to have fun quietly. Yes, quietly. My roommates do not hear this drum kit unless I'm really hammering away on the bass pedal, and that is just the nature of the pedal itself. It is metal, it has moving pieces, it makes noise. Further details are below. I encourage you to give it a read, as I waited weeks before writing this review and I have a lot to say. Well, if some drums are dual zone and some aren't, just have the primary zone sound as the default for single zone drum pads. If the issue is that the pads themselves are only programmed to input those specific commands to the brain, why? Yamaha was cranking out kits with this functionality in the early 2000s or earlier. I implore Donner to reach into the 21st century, this is my largest complaint by far. This is not a perfect set by any means: the drum module's #6 set has a typo (Old Shcool, maybe that's intentional, a pun on cool?), the high hat rubber doesn't provide enough rebound for 1/16 note beats, the high hat pedal has to be fully released to get a good open high-hat sound, some of the drum sets are very low volume with the headphones connected to the module (to the point that I can hear myself hitting the pads more than the drum sound), and the snare pad doesn't have great rebound. The DED-200 PRO features a built-in sound module that includes over 450 high-quality drum and percussion sounds, as well as the ability to import your own sounds via USB. The sound module also includes a variety of preset drum kits, which you can customize to your liking.

Note that I'm set up as a lefty. Setup was no problem, it just took a few extra minutes to make sure I reversed the parts pointed out in the document. The feel was another huge plus for this kit. They had true mesh heads, and the rebound was really authentic feeling. Incredibly, the heads could even be tuned, which let us adjust how taught they were. At the level that these drums are aimed at, it’s quite unnecessary, but still a nice bit of attention to detail.Electronic drum kits have come a long way since musicians first started pairing synthesizers to rubber drum pads in the early ’80s. Today, the best mesh heads can be calibrated to feel just like their acoustic counterparts, and they are equipped with multiple sensors that can react to the slightest changes in pressure. Those sensors feed data to modules that can be loaded with thousands of drum sounds or samples, giving musicians access to almost unlimited kit configurations. And best of all, those sounds can be fed through a pair of headphones, making electronic drum kits a great choice for beginning drummers (and those who share a house with them). On the other hand, rubber is still a great material for electronic cymbals. Good ones will have sensors on the bottom as well as the top to make them just as dynamic as the heads. They’ll be able to tell whether you’re playing the bow, bell or rim and you’ll even be able to “choke” them with your hand, just as you would with acoustic cymbals. My major criticism is that there is no way to change the individual function of a given pad. The snare will only have snare sounds. Even if you change the placement of the snare, it will always be one. The ride must be a ride. You cannot change the hi-hat control to a second bass pedal, unlike many other electronic drum kits.

To customize the sounds of individual drums and cymbals in a kit, you can use the sound module's editing functions to adjust parameters such as pitch, tone, and volume. You can also assign different sounds to each drum and cymbal pad, allowing you to create custom drum kits that suit your playing style and preferences. The cymbals I think could be quieter as you hit them, possibly with softly rubber? Besides the exterior thud noise of the cymbals, they’re good. The sensitivity for the bell and rim sections could be a bit better, a couple times I mean to hit the rim but it comes out as a bell sound.

Overall Take

Space: It is compact, but not tiny. It is not a sprawling, larger than life acoustic kit, if that's what you're looking for. Obviously, it cannot be, for a number of reasons. It is small enough to fit in the corner of most rooms quite comfortably, and depending on how you place the pads, you can probably fold it up with ease and fit it into smaller spaces within two minutes. The full kit takes up less than 5 feet by 3 feet worth of space. Again, it’s important to remember just how cheap this kit is when trying to look at things objectively. There wasn’t a huge dynamic range to them, but the fact that they didn’t sound like a MIDI kit is what is most impressive. Modular nature: Each pad can be moved and installed wherever the user wishes. Strangely, I like my hi-hat where the snare usually would be, and vice versa. With that in mind, I was able to place both of those where I want them, and that's prohibitively difficult on acoustic kits. There is a minor complain about how far this modular setup goes, but that's in the next section. In all, this is a kit that you can fully personalize on the hardware level, by changing where pads are located and how they're arranged. Once you have created a custom drum kit, you can save it to the sound module's memory as a user kit, which allows you to easily access and use your custom kit in future playing sessions. Overall, the DED-200 PRO offers a high level of flexibility and customization options, making it a great choice for drummers who want to create their own unique sound.