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How To Build a DIY Electronic Drum Kit
For nearly four years, I’d stopped playing drums. There were two main reasons. While I had an electronic drum kit, it was dreadful — the Roland HD1 entry level kit. Great for beginners, but it just didn’t offer a good experience for seasoned drummers with it’s small rubber pads, poor built-in pedals and woefully out of date drum sounds. The other reason was noise. While not nearly as loud as an acoustic kit, electronic drums transmit a lot of noise downwards thanks to the pedals, and living in an apartment made this a bit inconsiderate to my downstairs neighbours.
That all changed last year when I moved into a house, and I finally decided to upgrade my kit and get back into drumming properly as the noise factor would be less of an issue. Having traded in my HD1 and my beloved Zidjian A Customs (a sad, sad day) to raise some funds, I picked up a Roland TD-11 KV Special Edition, which sits halfway between the standard TD-11 KV and the TD-25 in the Roland range, with a ‘proper’ looking hi-hat mounted on a stand, an extra cymbal and a larger rack than the standard TD-11 kits.
The playing experience was far superior than my old HD1, but I was still playing on small drum pads, and I wanted something a bit more authentic.
Apart from simply looks, I found that playability wasn’t ideal with the small pads. It’s too easy to accidentally trigger rimshot sounds on the minuscule 10" snare.
I began looking into other options. Inspired by a few YouTube drummers who had built DIY edrum kits, I began painstakingly researching and planning my dream electronic kit.
Surprisingly, putting this thing together and setting it up with my drum module wasn’t nearly as hard as I had expected, and also much cheaper than a high-end Roland TD-30 or 50, which has comparably sized drum pads. Granted, my set up doesn’t support advanced features like positional sensing currently, but this can quite easily be added later by changing the module and getting a centre mounted trigger for the snare.
In this post I’ll show you how to build your own, including:
- What to look for in a base electronic drum kit
- What acoustic kits are suitable for conversion
- What additional components you need
