How to Play Your Electronic Drum Set
If you’ve just purchased your first electronic drum set, congratulations! You probably took a good amount of time deciding which drum set to get, especially since they can be very expensive. So you’ve purchased the electronic drum set, brought it home, and you’ve unpacked everything and got it all set up. Now it’s time to start making music. But wait…you suddenly realise you don’t know how to play your electronic drum set. Well, the good news is that it’s not that different from a standard, acoustic drum set, at least as far as basics go. You’ll still have two drumsticks, and you’ll still be hitting the various inputs to create sound. However, electric drum sets are quite different from acoustic drum sets in some very important ways.
To play your electronic drum set, take a drumstick and hit one of the pads. This activates the sensors inside the pad. These sensors will measure where exactly on the pad your drumstick hit, and they will also measure the force with which your drumstick hit the pad. This sends a signal from the sensor to the soundboard. The soundboard then translates this information into a sound, including making the sound louder or softer depending on how hard you hit the pad.
The soundboard has a number of different inputs on it. There’s one for the bass drum, one for cymbals, one for snare, etc. This lets it know what sound to make. That’s probably the biggest different between playing an acoustic drum set and playing an electric drum set: on an acoustic drum set, the noise is produced by the drum itself when you hit it. With an electronic drum set, the noise is actually produced by the soundboard and the input. This means you have to be certain the correct sections of the drum kit are connected to the correct inputs. If you connect your snare drum to the cymbal input, you’re going to hear cymbals whenever you hit the snare.
Setting up your software is another difference between traditional and electronic drum sets. Learning all the various computer programs and how they work is necessary in learning how to play your electronic drum set, so be ready to dive into the software manuals and play around with the programs until you know exactly how to set up your electronic drums to get the sounds you want.
