I probably didn’t need the extra drum or cymbal yet, but I purchased the expansion pack along with the kit and essentials bundle at the same time in November 2024. The kit was on sale, had great reviews, and the itch to play was quite strong at the time.

Setting up the drums was very easy, arranging the drums is an ongoing challenge. I’ve probably rearranged them weekly since they arrived, but I’m dialing it in. The kit is easy to manipulate and feels sturdy albeit just a tad short for me.

The extra drum and cymbal came in handy for use as select and start in Clone Hero, and I can even map the hi-hat pedal in if I choose. I used colored bandannas on the cymbals and colored tape on the drums to mark what the game colors are mapped to.

We have amassed quite a collection of songs to play, and it was just as fun as I remember - more so because it feels more like really playing.

Drum Kit Upgrades

The first piece of gear replaced were the Alesis headphones from the Essentials kit - they were garbage. My brother gifted me a very nice set of wired headphones and they have been awesome.

I also added a bunch of split sleeving to manage the cables instead of wrapping the cables around the frame. This makes it much easier to make adjustments to the arrangement on the fly and saves the cables from potential cat chewing.

I tried picking up the sound directly from the unit but it turns out it outputs TRS and I don’t have something to pick that up. Using it as a USB MIDI input to trigger software drums works very well.

Rise Up

I was starting to feel a little crazy thinking that the drum set and throne were just a little short for my comfort. I looked back at reviews of the kit and found others felt the same, and had solved it with generic Furniture Risers.

These work very well, and feel stable both under the kit and the throne. After a few more rearrangements it really feels like the kit is coming together.

Connect the Parts

To pick up the TRS output of the drum set, I purchased a small mixer from Amazon. This will take audio from the drum set, mic, or other gear I have and send to my PC or directly to my desk speakers. It also has an aux channel enabling me to add in and mess with pedals.

Speak to Me

The next gear I picked up was a small drum speaker because the desk speakers are too far to hear everything clearly. This enabled me to finally hear the drum sounds over the real noise without playing for my whole apartment complex.

Expensive Mistake

The Power cable for the new speaker is a bit short with a large power brick I’d like to hide. It looked like the DC connector was similar to the one for the drum set, so I did a little swap to test too quickly and fried the drum module. I found the module only on Ebay and should arrive next week, but for now I’m feeling it.

Continued here

---

← Back to blog