In re-setting up my studio at home, I decided to go with electronic drums over my acoustic drums for various reasons. Although I dearly love playing my acoustic kit and believe that it is the best recording drum set I have ever owned, it is too loud to play at home even with the door closed. With my new electronic kit, I can plug headphones into the brain, power it up, and play silently while still hearing the drums in all their glory though the headphones. In addition, the new electronic kits offer mesh drum heads that feel and play very similarly to acoustic drum heads. In other words, no more "Simmons" wrist.
When I set out to buy an electronic kit, I reserached all available options from Simmons, Roland, Yamaha, and Alesis. I also visited music stores and played as many as I could. In the end, I chose the Alesis Crimson II Kit, the second iteration of the popular Alesis Crimson Kit. This drum set checked all the boxes for me. The stock kit came with five mesh head drums - 2 rack toms and a floor tom - and four cymbals - hi hat, ride, and 2 crash. Compared to the original Crimson kit the second version came with one extra cymbal an updated drum module with more sounds of a higher quality. All in all, the Crimson II was the perfect low-noise solution for me and the perfect balance between features and cost. The mesh heads are quiet, springy and much closer in response to acoustic drums, plus
the drums actually look like acoustic drums from afar. making it stand out from the Roland and Yamaha offerings in this price range.
One of the first things I noticed about the Crimson II drums as compared to others was the larger drum sizes. The snare drum pad is 12" in diameter and the floor tom measures 10" in diameter as opposed to the smaller drums that come with the Roland TD-11KV or the Yamaha DTX520K, kits that are considerably more expensive than the Crimson II. The Crimson mesh heads also have actual drum hoops and lugs that can be tightened or loosened for fine tuning of their response, tightened for more spring or loosened for a more "deadened" bounce. The bass drum is an 8-inch mesh pad that sits on an upright kick tower and it can also be tensioned to suit my foot technique. The tower supports both single and double bass pedals and there are spikes on both sides that allow it to grip to carpet and other floorings. The pedal connects tightly to the tower unit and makes for a comfortable playing experience.
Before my kit arrived via FedEx, I scoured eBay and picked up a used Alesis 8" Crimson drum pad, another 10" floor tom pad, and a 12" snare pad. I added these to the kit as additional toms, giving me four rack toms and two floor toms. I also picked up a used pair of crash cymbals. Because the Crinson pads offer dual triggers on the snare and tom pads (head and rim) allowing you to assign different sounds to each, it was fairly simple to use TRS "Y" cables as a means of using the additional pads and cymbals in lieu of the rims and assign them the sounds that I could have assigned to the rims. The Crimson II drum module also has one pair of extra "outs" into which you can expand the kit with a pad and a cymbal. Long story short, I have 4 rack toms tuned just as I would tune comparable acoustic toms with descending tones and two floor toms that are tuned the same way. The ride cymbal can be played just as you would a conventional ride on the rim, the bow, and the bell. The hi-hat is controlled through a foot pedal that operates much like a conventional hi hat stand allowing me to play in a variety of clutch positions from fully open to fully closed. Finally, with four crash cymbal pads I have them set up as two crashes with different tones, a china, and a splash.
The Crimson II comes with 671 sounds in total. These range from standard acoustic drum sets to electronic drum sets to percussion and even some SFX sounds. The sounds are spread across 54 drum kits. You can also store 20 drum kits of my own creation. Supplemeting the module's sounds, through its MIDI out or USB port, I can run a cable into my DAW and access my EZ Drummer plug-in drum kits. All I had to do was assign it to be a MIDI controller in the DAW settings.
If you'd like to watch a review of the Crimson kit, here's a YouTube video from Anderton's Music as they go through the sounds and fetures of the kit.