My four year old daughter is getting a bit of a taste for playing the drums.
She’s had a blast hitting the twats out her brother’s old mini drum kit, but she’s kind of outgrowing it and wants something she can grow into a bit.
I’m thinking electronic drum kit, probably second hand, probably don’t want to spend much over about £150. I can see a fair amount of stuff on Reverb that looks alright and is in my price range, but I know fuck all about electronic drum kits.
My 17yr old son is a drummer. We don’t have anywhere for him to house an acoustic kit so we got him an electronic one. The one he has is an Alesis mesh kit and although it was a few years ago that we got it for him, mesh seemed to be the best option out there outside of the real thing (and I’m not aware of that having changed, but it could have).
My brother is a drummer and has one of the older Roland kits. It’s the TD7 I think.
His kids (8&5) and my 5 year old have all played it a lot and my nephew has got pretty good.
Mesh pads at least on the snare are a good idea - for kids that age the rubber ones are too rigid and have too much rebound for their hands. Plus it’s still pretty noisy thumping away at rubber pads
Worth mentioning Alesis make a kit called the debut that is designed for kids. But honestly I’d go with a second hand Roland or (full size) alesis.
I had a Roland E Drum kit for years. Most kits now have mesh pads which are not only more realistic feeling but also very quiet. I noticed the company Donner has an e-kit for relatively inexpensive and gets great reviews. Look up the Donner DED-80. Alesis has low priced base kit also. I miss having my electronic drum kit. If you have the space it’s a great instrument to have around. Drums were my intro instrument at age 10. A great way to establish a sense of rhythm which will be a stepping stone to piano, keys, guitar, etc…
You can probably find something usable for your price point. Mesh heads are very nice. I’d imagine most kits nowadays have a bunch of stuff for you to play along to which is way more fun than a metronome.
Buying stuff for kids is such a crap shoot. Is it worth spending a bit extra on something that they can grow into? Will they decide they dont like it in a month? A week?
There are 3 areas that are most important to look at, if you want her playing to translate to acoustic drums one day:
Snare drum (must be mesh at least).
Kick drum (must play like a real pedal, can recommend Roland KT-10).
Hi-hat (must be real, can get the low-volume ones with the holes).
Whatever kit you get initially, if your daughter sticks at it then aim for those upgrades at some point.
Best of luck and enjoy it the ride! My son played drums in front all the kids and parents recently… went into this breakbeat and everyone started nodding their head… proud as fuck I was
Many people think electric drums are the answer to loud drum playing. But, if you want a drummer to play more softly, just place sheet music in front of them.
Id say get a full size kit. then she can grow into it. If she decides later to ditch it, it will be easier to resell.
Get an E Kit of some kind, anything with a bunch of different sounds to choose from, this will give even more fun factor, changing up the kit sounds, making her own kits etc.
Honestly I wouldnt bother with mesh for a four year old, a nice set of headphones definitely.
Nice pedals would be something I would look at much later, say 6 or 7 years old.
Drums are an amazing instrument, and if she’s keen and sticks with it (pun intended) get her lessons down the track and teach her to read charts. Then she can give the righteous finger to people that do drummer sheet music jokes.
Great idea! Super fun instrument and you’re always in demand if you can play them.
I’ve been surprised at how good the lower priceed alesis kits are for the money. The Roland stuff is great of course too. I don’t own either but I’ve played around with many examples of each in stores and I have a selection of individual pads (mixed types and brands).
If the idea is to have her someday transition to acoustic drums I’d go for something other than rubber for the pads as they’re the least representative of what drum heads feel like and they can be fatiguing on the hand and wrist joints. Mesh is good (and very quiet) but I wouldn’t discount Mylar. It seems to be less common but it’s realistic though not as quiet as the mesh. I know alesis has made them, not sure about Roland.
When I was a teenager I had a great time with the Yamaha DD-55 plugged into a practice bass amp.
I bought a DD-35 for my kids and they seemed to like it enough so then I bought a new DD-75, with the nicer beater pedal, but they didn’t use it much. Shipping it to the reverb buyer cost $80
If memory serves, the DD-55 was just as good as the DD-75. Functionally the same in sound and pad feel and build quality. (Good being a relative term because the HH would trigger randomly if I hit the share hard enough in both machines.)
Oh, and I recommend rubber tips for the sticks. Really cut down on the noise of the hits, which was loud enough to overpower the internal speakers
got me a venerable Yamaha DTXPress III back in 2012 and still using it.
can highly recommend.
also, compatible spare parts are fairly inexpensive and not difficult to find.
I’m not so much bothered about the noise as I’m bothered about ease of setup/weight/portability. It’ll also be good to have the different sounds and accompaniment stuff that comes with a lot of electronic drums.
We live on a cult de sac full of deaf old people and our house is pretty well insulated, noise-wise. I’m hopeful that my garage will have been properly soundproofed and converted to a studio by the time she grows up and decides she wants an acoustic kit, although most likely she’ll get bored of it all after a month and it’ll all be on eBay before she’s 8…
I don’t know my electronic drum kits from Adam (see what I did there?) but I briefly had a Tourtech kit, one of the TT range, and many was that fun! Seemed well-built and capable of taking a beating. Pretty big, but you can adjust the heights of each piece. So many cables though.
