A criticism of content in the specialist media/trade press (e.g. specialist podcasts) and the content of some specialist retailers and influencer videos/outputs


I've noticed that product videos, interviews and podcasts by or with some (alleged) e-drum experts as well as dealers and dealer platforms often don't address important and critical things about e-drum hardware at all or, even worse, even suggest that everything is fine with device X. Unfortunately, newbies are often misguided by this information. Newbies who only get this kind of information (and unfortunately there is not much other/alternative information - I, for example, do my best to counter this and really enlighten people) are unfortunately often misguided and then spend a lot of money on dubious devices.

It's mainly about essential things like module latency, hi-hat systems and functions and their design-related advantages and disadvantages, or in the negative case even unsolvable shortcomings, the authenticity of dynamic translation (which in some cases is fundamentally not possible at all - keyword “hotspotting” with mesh head pads and cymbal pads) and the complete ignoring of one of the most fundamental disadvantages of e-drums to date (which, btw, can be fixed from now on by an advanced software engine), namely the inability to represent and make audible the sticking (played on a drum or a hihat) (thus an essential tool and stylistic device/method of drumming is completely lost, and I ask myself, if we are talking about e-drums as a replacement for acoustic drums (and that's what it's almost always been about, unfortunately, but more on that in a moment...), why is and has this important drumming tool for musical expression, the sticking ( = the handsets), been completely ignored by e-drum experts/dealers/dealer platforms / by all specialist media?

Furthermore, most of those mentioned above don't even think about looking beyond the traditional and conventional ( = e-drums should replace an acoustic kit because of volume and/or recording advantages/possibilities). I say that e-drums offer completely new and to a certain extent revolutionary possibilities for the drumming approach and for making music with percussion instruments ➜ take a look at this post. Unfortunately, hardly anyone has taken note of this yet, and then everyone wonders why the e-drum business and scene remains so puny and stagnant: they always present and talk about the same old wine in new bottles. I often find this boring (➜ do you want to join the millions who are all doing the same thing?), because the incredible advanced possibilities of e-drums guide your playing style and allow you to reinvent the wheel of drumming to a certain extent. This is a small digression into “advanced possibilities”.

Now a few more thoughts on product videos created by top drummers/influencers: various demonstration drummers for product videos, who are at a (very) high level in terms of drumming skills, can, thanks to their technical skills, play around the problems and shortcomings of various e-drum hardware, compensate for them to a certain extent and thus conceal them. This is exactly what happens in many e-drum product videos; of course, not a word is said about it (you don't want to mess things up with the industry - whose bread I eat, the song I sing) and newbies are once again deceived to a certain extent.

Please share and spread this post so that newbies and interested parties are not misguided.


Example:
"How to use EZdrummer 3 with an E-Drum | Tutorial ( ➜ Link )" :

Timestamp 02:58
➜ This timestamp is exactly why I find the video very problematic. It suggests that it comes from experts (you know the name: “Bonedo” is big after all) and that you can have 2.7ms e-drum latency with “Millenium”* (not a word about the bad module latency (almost 10ms!), for example). In the comments, a lot of deceptive, half-truths and even completely falsehoods go uncorrected (such as ‘I could even set the latency to 32 or 16 samples with Asio4All’). People who don't give themselves any other information (and many will of course cheer after the video because it meets their expectations and thus unfortunately also tick off the latency issue as “learned”: “getting a cheap 'Medeli&Co' e-kit is fine for e-drumming with good sound” is the fallacy here) are sent on a very deceptive course.

* "Perfect! - As you can hear, EZ Drummer now reacts without any noticable latency" ➜ This is a very bad joke! : What significance does a stupid YouTube video have in this respect?!
The latency demonstrated with the Millenium module and the 128 sample ASIO buffer size is well over 10 milliseconds, so it's definitely in the no-go range.

The Toontrack (EZ3) latency report is also deceptive, by the way, because it is purely the conversion of samples (at a certain sample rate) into milliseconds and completely conceals the converter latency of the audio interface. The estimated ASIO output latency at 128 samples buffer size at 48 kHz sample rate is at leat 4+ms for a good and fast audio interface. And EZ Drummer introduces additional resampling latency when run at 48 kHz (instead of the native sampling format 44.1 kHz). That can be up to 2ms (depending on the used internal DSP from audio effects).