So I went bananas and got myself a DM6Kit electronic drum set a few months back. I did this because, while I'm currently a less-than-amateur drummer, I've always liked the idea of having an electric kit so that I could work out human-sounding tracks and fills instead of drawing them on a grid in FL Studio. With the advent of USB-enabled kits, this is something I can actually do now.

I skip the built-in sounds and just plug directly into my MacBook. Then I fire up Garageband and assign EZDrummer to the active track. I've written about EZDrummer before and it continues to be pretty awesome.

The Good:

• sturdy construction and easy to assemble.
• did I mention it's sturdy? You can really whale on these things.
• the kick pedal and pad is surprisingly solid.
• the cymbal pads have different zones for the bell and the edge, nice touch
• the USB setup is a breeze. I didn't even bother with any of the built-in sounds. Paired with the MacBook running EZDrummer, it sounds pretty fantastic

The Not So Good:

• the hihat pedal, it really sucks. You have to really train yourself to open/close it at just the right moment or you'll drop a note. Also, not that I expected better, but there's only two positions: open and closed. There's no half-open or loose closed/tight closed. I've seen electric kits that can do this, but the DM6Kit is not one of them.
• you get one crash cymbal and that's it. There's no way to add more pads. This isn't a real problem for me as I can just grab a few notes and reassign them to different crash sounds after the fact. But get used to that one crash.
• the built-in sounds are weak sauce. Again, not a problem for me as I'm using the DM6Kit as a fancy MIDI trigger, otherwise it'd be a real disappointment.
• this isn't for nuanced playing, obviously. You'll have a hard time pulling off a realistic-sounding buzz roll, and playing with brushes means loading up another kit.

Of course, the whole benefit to this is to have realistic drums without having to set up mics or infuriating the neighbors. Bang out the best live performance you can, then edit the parts you're unhappy with. Add in a missed accent or scoot a late kick over. Straighten out a sloppy fill, or punch in on a separate track, re-do the fill, then copy/paste the notes into the final track. Or switch the whole performance from the Yamaha to the Craviotto kit by way of a dropdown menu.

Here's me playing along to a song I'm working on, running the DM6Kit into Garageband with the EZDrummer "Classic 4 Mic" setting with a Craviotto sound bank. Despite my middle-school rock band level performance, I gotta say it sounds a whole lot like real drums to my ear.

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Status: happy!