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Thread: How I made a $800 electric drum kit for $350

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    Default How I made a $800 electric drum kit for $350

    Ive been wanting a electric drum kit with great sounds and mesh heads on all the pads for a while now. It seemed like one has to spend around $800 to get such a kit . I am now in the process of building my ownfor half the price.

    I started with this tabletop kit :

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIdomFU5Foc"]YouTube - Tommaso Monopoli - Solo[/ame]

    It has about 26 full kits in it, which sound quite nice to my ear , and 5 user kits where you can assign any of the preset sounds to whatever pads you want . I like being able to assign 2 seperate crash cymbals , that sound different, to the two crash cymbal pads , instead of being stuck with a ride and 1 crash. It also is very user friendly to operate and has 3 levels of reverb and the ability to split any of the drum sounds to left/right pan. This comes in handy when recording on a multi track studio because I like to put the snare/hi hat to the right and all the bass/toms to the left. It also has a built in preamp that will power speakers, which is another bonus as I will explain.

    I found one of these tabletop kits , used on craigslist for $100 . I brought it home and took the unit apart and desoldered all the pos/neg wires at the circuit board which attached to the chessy drum pads. I then went on ebay and ordered a $79 aluminum drum rack with clamps , and one of these ribbon connectors for $12 , which makes reconnecting the new mesh drum heads to the circuit board, a bit easier :


    I arranged the 4 circuit boards in a small ,light wooden box and hot glued them firmly in the box . This box is now my new drum brain.

    I then went to goodwoods drumheads and bought the 4 pack tom kit of mesh heads for $119 { 3 mesh tom heads and 1 snare tom head}

    [Ebay links and commercial links not permitted in Drum Chat. Please reference the Forum Rules. - Tom]

    I reused 3 of the large pads off the tabletop kit, for the hi hat/ crash cymbal /ride cymbal along with the 2 included drum pedals that trigger the bass drum and open/close hi hat ......and the 4 goodwoods mesh heads for the snare and 3 toms, and soldered them all back into the circuit board . After that, I did a quick check to make sure all the drum pieces/triggers were working properly.

    Now my next step is to arrange all components on the aluminum rack along with the small wooden box with the brain in it and then finally I purchased two - 4 ohm speakers off ebay for $15 which are 3 way -6x9 car speakers. Each of these speakers will be housed in a square wooden enclosure and then one gets put on the rack on the left side and the other on the right side and the speakers then get hooked up to the brain .

    I will probably have about 16 hours of work in this project but I will now have a great sounding kit, with nice mesh heads so I have a more realisitc drum feel. From what Ive seen on ebay, I am saving about $300- $400 if I had just bought a complete kit that came with all mesh heads on the snare and toms.

    If anyone is interested , I will try and post pictures when the whole thing is finally assembled.
    Last edited by drummer; 12-30-2010 at 06:33 PM. Reason: Commercial Link / E-bay link

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