Get informed, get electrified

Sequestered away on the Musician's Friend website are many articles and tech tips about various drumming topics, about everything from tuning your drums to how to replace conga heads. There's also a section with hands-on product reviews of drum and percussion gear. For example, a review was recently posted that tells you about everything you would want to know about the new Yamaha DTX IV Electronic Drum Set, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, made its public debut at last month's Winter NAMM show.
Also new from Yamaha is the DD-65 Digital Drum Kit, (with a USB output!) For those who aren't hip to the DD Series, they're compact pad sets that are built into a handy portable console that you can carry around under your arm. I've got a couple of earlier versions of these and have used them a lot for both gigs (as an adjunct to my regular kit) and recording. The onboard sounds are respectable, but for me their usefullness lies in that they have MIDI out. This allows them to plug into dedicated percussion modules like the EMU Procussion (now extinct) and the Alesis DM5 (still alive). Being able to play percussion with sticks is infinitely better than tapping out parts on a keyboard. The upper-level DD units even have rudimentary foot pedals so you can play them almost like a real kit, and they sell for a fraction of what it costs to get into a full-fledged electronic set.

Percussion Discussion: "The U.S. is the greatest country in the world, but unfortunately it's not open musically. Music is very formatted here. It has become a form of sound pollution, with loud sampled drums being pumped into every public place. And people get used to it: when kids see a live drummer playing a kit now it sounds weird to them—they expect a big, heavy drum machine thud. So touring in the U.S. with my music is rough." - Bassist Richard Bona, in Bass Player magazine.