The decision is firstly one of convenience. Have you got a house where someone can beat out several decibels of sound without disturbing the neighbours? Don't take the question lightly. Someone practising on a drum kit will drive the neighbours insane unless you are a decent distance away or have some very effective sound proofing. I built a concrete garage at the bottom of my garden. I lined it with half inch plywood and insulated the tin roof with household insulation. I played only between morning and late evening.. It wasn't enough. The neighbours called environmental health. I had to have an internal shell of wood and insulated plasterboard constructed to reduce the noise level by about 75%. It was expensive but the environmental health people told my neighbours to leave me alone. They just expect you to do all you can to be a good neighbour. It isn't unreasonable. Acoustic drums are noisy! Even with pads, the vibrations will irritate anyone within touching distance. So be very aware. If you are in a terraced house, flat or semi-detached, you need to seriously consider how much noise or thudding you are making. An electric kit, with headphones, or an amp turned real low, will be no more a disturbance than a set of practice pads - safely within legal and neighbourly limits. 

​

     Financially, there are cheap and expensive kits in both camps. Neither are particularly better or worse. When the noise situation is dealt with, it's about usage and preference. 

​

     I played an acoustic kit on the road for the first year or so. It was a big, silver Premier, beginner's range kit, pieced together till I had 10 drums. It was great sounding at some gigs and sounded a bit cheap at others. I didn't use mics at first. They were small clubs and you were stuck with the acoustics of the room. Simmons kits were in fashion so I traded it in for some Simmons pads, an amp and a sound module and gigged around with it, upgrading as I went along, for about 14 years. It sounded great everywhere, but I often had to put up with purists saying "It isn't a real drum kit, though, is it?!" [I did a summer season and the guys in the other band, with an acoustic drummer, called me Batman! I thought it was damn funny so I gigged in a batman t-shirt for a while, and came up with a nickname for their band, which caught on, but I can't repeat it!]

     An electric kit will also give you a huge range of sounds - percussion and tuned instrument sounds that an acoustic kit can't. I used my Simmons pads to trigger horns, marimba chords and arpeggios and sound effects by the score - it is very much like having a keyboard you can play with sticks.  Anyway, if it is about getting a huge range of greats sound very easily, and you don't mind upsetting jazz guys and other pros, then maybe electrics are for you. [Sound men love them. No mics. Just plug in and tweak the tone buttons.]

      The next question is 'If electric kits are so amazing, what do the shops still sell more acoustic drums?' Well, your top of the range electric kits pretty well copy the acoustic experience and extend it into new realms, but it will never be quite the same, not until they re-design them. I had this argument on Facebook with 20 different guys and only one really got it. He was a sound man.

    The argument goes like this. An electric drum kit like Roland doesn't actually generate a sound.  It only reproduces one. You get a version of a sound someone else recorded for you. It's a lot like an electric keyboard. Keyboards play loud and soft. But drums are like guitars, not keyboards. You can get loads of different sounds by playing them differently. A snare drum batter head has thousands of variations of sounds in it. A Roland snare drum patch probably has a handful. When you change the patch you get another handful and so on. And you might get a thousand patches. But you will still only get a handful of variations of each.

     There is a subtlety available in acoustic drums that hasn't yet been equalled in electric ones.

     They succeeded with guitars.  An electric guitar is instrument that is in every way equal to its acoustic counterpart. Because it generates an infinite number of new sounds and you can modify them more or less as you please. A Roland sound module will have a list on offer. If you want more, you buy another list. And your kits sound more or less the same as the kits bought by other shoppers.

     When I came off the road I bought an acoustic kit again - a 2nd hand Pearl Masters Studio kit. It sounds great in most places and I know how to mic it to sound good in the rest. I realise now that the sound you get depends on what you can afford. My old Premier kit was a bit too cheap for pro gigs. A top of the range Premier would have done the trick, but I didn't know that and went down electric avenue. Now I prefer acoustic drums.

     I have recently heard some superb sounding cheap kits. It's cymbals that are the problem these days. You still have to spend good money to get good cymbals. 

    In conclusion. One day someone will design a superb electric drum kit. As good as an electric guitar. It hasn't happened yet.

     In the meantime, if you have a place to play that doesn't cause disturbance,  I advise beginners to buy a cheap, acoustic kit and spend good money on cymbals. At least a good pair of hi-hats and a good crash ride. If you don't have a good room, buy the best electric kit you can afford. After that - acoustic or electric - practice till you drop!

          Since I wrote this piece I have seen a piece of equipment that I have been waiting 20 years for. I've been arguing about using mics as triggers instead of Transducers for years and no-one seems to have gone that route until now; a truly responsive electric instrument - the equivalent of an electric guitar. The Les Paul of drums. Well at last I have seen it. I haven't played it yet but it looks like everything I have argued for and dreamed of! Take a look at the addendum - The Kork Wavedrum.   

​