Is this a normal feeling?

BramVanroy

Senior Member
(No, this topic is not about a teenager finding out about his or her genitals.)

I have been playing the drums for 13-15 years or so now. Which means: following lessons for that long. First I followed classical percussion and drumming (snaredrums theory, "standard" non-shuffle genres, but also a lot other percussion, including melodic percussion) - and now I'm in my fourth or fifth year of jazz (shuffle-y genres, more improv).

BUT since I've started jazz, I also started playing on an electronic kit (as some of you know). I put my acoustic kits in boxes. Now after moving stuff around, there is no place left for it anyway. I've been quite happy with the electronic for the past years. Recording stuff is easy. It has an integrated metronome, cool play-alongs. It's easy to adjust kits and so on. However, for the last couple of months I terribly miss my acoustic kit. I have been playing some rehearsels and gigs on an acoustic kit and daaaaamn son, it's so much more fun! I can't tell why, though, but the dynamic and atmosphere is so different.

I really want to start playing on an acoustic kit again, but first and foremost, there's simply no place to put it. Secondly, I have no experience recording an acoustic drumset and I fear that it would take me too long to actually get good results with the recording.


Are there any others that miss their drumset, or that had to put away some instruments for some reason and reallllly 'miss' it?
 
(No, this topic is not about a teenager finding out about his or her genitals.)

I have been playing the drums for 13-15 years or so now. Which means: following lessons for that long. First I followed classical percussion and drumming (snaredrums theory, "standard" non-shuffle genres, but also a lot other percussion, including melodic percussion) - and now I'm in my fourth or fifth year of jazz (shuffle-y genres, more improv).

BUT since I've started jazz, I also started playing on an electronic kit (as some of you know). I put my acoustic kits in boxes. Now after moving stuff around, there is no place left for it anyway. I've been quite happy with the electronic for the past years. Recording stuff is easy. It has an integrated metronome, cool play-alongs. It's easy to adjust kits and so on. However, for the last couple of months I terribly miss my acoustic kit. I have been playing some rehearsels and gigs on an acoustic kit and daaaaamn son, it's so much more fun! I can't tell why, though, but the dynamic and atmosphere is so different.

I really want to start playing on an acoustic kit again, but first and foremost, there's simply no place to put it. Secondly, I have no experience recording an acoustic drumset and I fear that it would take me too long to actually get good results with the recording.


Are there any others that miss their drumset, or that had to put away some instruments for some reason and reallllly 'miss' it?


I can answer your question by giving you kind of the reverse of what happened to you.
I have been playing acoustic drums all of my life (60 years).
I recently purchased an electronic kit so I can practice and not bother anyone.

I don't like my electronic kit very much because I can't make the hundreds of sounds that I can make on my acoustic set.
Acoustic drums are musical instruments. They can be played to express any and all human emotions.
And thus in a musical group, band or orchestra they can compliment any and all forms of music.


.
 
Being a jazz player I can totally understand your frustrations with the e kit.
Playing metal is fine (for me at least) on an e-kit but to miss out on all those subtle nuances used in jazz (especially on the snare) would really suck.
 
Hi Bram,
Yes its most definitely normal! I have been forced to sell bits and bobs over the years to get by and each time it feels like I have lost some part of myself. Most recently I had to sell a 10" UFIP splash cymbal that I bought at college for £120 new, I got £20 for it!!!
And yes I miss it. I realize that these are only a possession, yet because music allows me to speak and express my emotions unlike any other way the equipment that I keep means a great deal.
Also, there is nothing like the real thing, so crack that acoustic out!!!

Tam.x
 
I was kinda hoping it was about puberty...

Nah. Truth be told I think I could never get used to an electric drum set. It's too sterile sounding, feeling, and with the exception of those really $$$ Roland kits, the look isnt there either. Plus I gotta have the actual hi hats to slam my foot down on. I hate that when I try to use finesse it simply doesn't register.

No I think I'll pass on Electric drum sets. The feeling is totally normal!
 
I feel your pain.

When I got out of the Air Force and moved to Seattle a few years ago, I had to keep my acoustic kit packed up as we had a small house in neighborhood with close neighbors.

After a month or so, my wife insisted (yes, awesome wife) I get an electronic kit to keep up my chops. What little I had then...I had only played for a year or two at that point.

To get my "real kit" fix, I was at least able to go to the local drum shop fairly often where I took lessons and play on one of the practice room kits. Plus, I had a snare set up in the practice room with the e-kit so I could play brushes.

Now, we have a house where I have an acoustic kit set up all the time. The e-kit is pretty much a practice pad kit at this point. I have it upstairs so I can practice when my wife is home.

So hang in there. There may come a day when you can employ both kits to suit your needs.
 
I had a 15 year break from playing drums and started again back in 2004 with a Roland TD20. I got my first acoustic set around 3 years ago and haven't played the elctronic drums much since then. There is jsut no comparison in feel and sound and the electronic drums only have a place when noise is an issue or if the drummer wants to explore electronic sounds.
 
There are some great e-kits available today but real drums are just better.

If you pack away the e-kit and set your real drums up in their place would you really not have the space? I think if drums are a priority you will make room for them, or set them up partially so you can move a few things in place to get going everyday.

As for recording - an overhead mic sounds decent enough while you figure out the rest.
 
My audiologist talked me into trying his edrums and I damned near gave myself carpal tunnel. They're great for practicing rudiments but there are no real dynamics. I love how you can get totally different sounds from the same drum just by changing the way that you play it. Electronic drums have their place but there's nothing like the real thing.
 
If you pack away the e-kit and set your real drums up in their place would you really not have the space? I think if drums are a priority you will make room for them, or set them up partially so you can move a few things in place to get going everyday.
That's not really an option. We live in a house that's +100 years old (true story) and the first floor (i.e. not ground level, but one higher) has a very unstable floor. It can hold my e-kit, but I am afraid that it wouldn't be able to handle the weight of my acoustic kit. The acoustic kit used to be in a 'barn'-like structure, but it wasn't the best place either: temperature changed a lot night/day, quite moist so my drum heads cracked more often than I wanted. Now, that barn is used for my brother's motorcycle and stuff. His own workspace.

One of the downsides of still living at home I suppose.

Do many of you have your own space for the drumset? I.e. a separate room?
 
I can relate a lot to this post. I always played acoustic kits and had always preferred them; I'd take an awful acoustic kit over a great ekit back when I was younger, even swore I'd never use an ekit. Then came superior drummer matched with roland and I was sold on how easy it was to get a great sound quickly for demos. Then I moved around a few times and had to pack away my kit which I used for gigging while I played on another kit at rehearsal. After having been in way too many bands, they all came to end at about the same time and I stepped away from committing to any other projects. So, I sold my acoustic kit, cymbals and hardware. Now I'm playing on a TD12 and various pads and triggers scrounged together from ebay. I love the ability to play at any time of day or night, a volume knob, a built-in mixer that I can plug my iphone into and play along to an idea a guitar player emailed me, or playing along to iTunes. I simply love my ekit now and could see me upgrading, but never abandoning it. I got a roland PA for it if I need to compete with a guitar amp, but anymore it seems most guys are using guitar processors (Pod HD or AxeFX), so I just plug into a headphone amp and play that way.

Having said that, I started taking jazz lessons again after years of no lessons, just gigging and playing for various friends' projects, and there's just something missing from the ekit. For all its strengths, it still has some issues. There are no dead hits with an acoustic kit, unless a head breaks. There are no mistriggers. The nuances you can get from a single cymbal, particularly a ride, are still far behind what you get from the real thing.

Yes, recording acoustic drums will set me back a few grand, but we drummers today are still blessed to be able to do that! Getting a decent drum sound no longer requires a trip to a studio and shelling out the dollars, and once you've invested in mics, I/O, and DAW, you're set, you can record as much as you want. That's why I'm saving up to buy a new acoustic kit. I've been out of the market for so long that I'm reading everything I can and hitting every cymbal I come across. I already bought a new snare so I can use brushes while working on my jazz lessons.

I'd like to think with age and the progress of ekit technology, I've come to see them as having overlapping roles. For demos and night practice or working out an idea, it's hard to beat the ekit. But, the ekit is trying to simulate the real thing for a reason. There's just nothing like the response you get from a real kit and all the nuances you can pull from it. I will say this however, the maintenance of the ekit is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much easier. It's amazing how quickly having the real snare brought back all the memories of hours of sitting around swapping out heads (so many tension rods!), polishing, dusting, oiling, finding squeaks (ekits don't use mics! Got a squeaky bass drum pedal? So what!), and all the other maintenance involved with a real kit.

I'm glad to be in a place where I can have both. To the OP, the space restriction is a big bummer, but you really can't squeeze in a small kit even? Like a 4 piece with just a ride and hihat?
 
Took a 10 or 12 years break from playing only acoustics to playing electronic getting back on an acoustic kit was like letting the monster out I love my electronics for quite practice but NOTHING is like the real thing.
 
That's not really an option. We live in a house that's +100 years old (true story) and the first floor (i.e. not ground level, but one higher) has a very unstable floor. It can hold my e-kit, but I am afraid that it wouldn't be able to handle the weight of my acoustic kit. The acoustic kit used to be in a 'barn'-like structure, but it wasn't the best place either: temperature changed a lot night/day, quite moist so my drum heads cracked more often than I wanted. Now, that barn is used for my brother's motorcycle and stuff. His own workspace.

One of the downsides of still living at home I suppose.

Do many of you have your own space for the drumset? I.e. a separate room?

The age of your house should not matter, as long as it was constructed properly. When I was a kid we lived in a 2 story house that was built in the 1840's. The house was crooked from settling with age. It had paper and hay for insulation. The foundation was random big rocks, the basement floor was dirt, and the main support beams of the house were poorly sawn out of tree trunks. My parents had a king size waterbed on the second floor. That is roughly 250 gallons, or about 2000lb. We all know what happens in a bed. The floor never caved. I don't think an acoustic drum kit will collapse your floor unless the construction was extremely poor.

I have a separate room for my drums. They are on the second floor, which bounces when I walk across it. But I have absolutely no fear of the floor giving out.
 
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