Alesis Turbo Mesh Kit review

Are cheap electronic drums good for learning to play?

• This article is also available as a video on YouTube.

First things first: I'm not an experienced drummer. In fact, I bought the kit as my very first drum kit to start and learn the basics, just to have some fun. However, playing music has been my hobby all my life and I've observed a lot of drummers up close, so I did have a basic idea how drums work when I started.

I've now had the set for quite some time (actually three years already - I was supposed to write this review two years ago, but it hasn't been a top priority I guess) and I've had my first gig as a drummer, playing cover songs such as Purple Haze (by Jimi Hendrix) and I Can't Explain (by The Who). I've at least once played with a bad drum set, an average drum set, and a very nice drum set. So, even if I'm not that experienced, at least I now have some basic knowledge on what's it like to play real drums. I can therefore assess the quality of the Alesis kit a bit, but since the specific kit itself is a bit old now, the main point of this article is how well is a kit like this suited for beginners to get the drumming started in a fun way.

Getting acquainted with the drums

After I had fiddled around 10 hours with the drums, I actually went to a workplace hobby band rehearsal to try out real drums for the very first time in my life. It was a bit shaky. As I mentioned, I had no prior experience with drums, only what I'd seen my band mates play.

After a few dozen hours more with the electronic drums, also the acoustic drum set started to feel more comfortable. I only played the acoustic set a couple of times during my first year as an aspiring drummer, but even then the limitations of electronic drums started to become quite obvious, especially in the cheaper price class. Although, for the e-drums there were a few things on the plus side, too.

Some of the limitations include: only a little bit of dynamics, not that many sounds, touch and feel are so-so. Some of the positive things include: they can sound better than a really bad drum set, they don't take much space, and the sticks hardly wear at all.

Noise level

Some notes about the real life noise level of the electronic drums:

• The mesh pads don't make that much noise. The hard plastic rims surrounding the meshes on the other hand are very, very loud. I took one of the pads apart and there isn't any real reason for the rims to be so high. One could maybe cut or grind them down a bit if they have the tools.
• The rubber cymbals do make quite a bit of sound. I actually added some shock absorbers to the hi-hat surface, as it was a bit annoying in the beginning.
• The pedals make a terrible noise. I modified them a bit to make them much more quiet. I made a separate video about it on YouTube.
• To help your neighbour downstairs and stop mechanical noise especially from the pedals, a carpet underneath the drums is nice to have. I also added a piece of yoga mat underneath the pedals. This, along with the carpet makes them quite wobbly, though. Without the analog feel (the pedals are on/off triggers), the pedals might register a hit at a surprising time, or not register at all. Best sound proofing would be a floating hard deck with the pedals attached to it.

All in all the total noise level is quite tolerable and would be fine for example for a child, if they are a bit too shy to make some noise. I was somewhat shy as a kid and couldn't bear loud noises - in fact I avoided all kinds of noise. For me, the acoustic drums would've been too much, but electronic drums would've probably worked just fine.

For general idea about the noise level check out the intro video again, this time with real sounds. Volume-wise, a hard hit to the drums sounds a bit like snapping your fingers, so not very loud.

Technical information

The pedals are spring-loaded with an on/off trigger just before bottoming out. As explained in the noise level section, if the pedals aren't on a hard surface, this might introduce problems with time and unregistered hits. The assembly is also under constant small stress when kicking the pedals. This stress eventually resulted in one of the legs of the TRS (tip, ring, sleeve) jack to be broken and signal being cut, so the pedal didn't work anymore. The connection is just TS (tip and sleeve), so I fixed it with a jumper wire running from the ring to sleeve as shown in the picture.

Can you make the pedals double bass pedals by connecting them on parallel? Not quite. As the pedals are on/off and there's a bit of "on" area after the trigger (when the pedal is pressed down), if you try to pedal too quickly, the "on" time will overlap between the pedals, and kicks fill fail to register from the other pedal. I tried a physical connection as shown in the picture and recorded a demo video about it.

All the pads and cymbals are single hit area, with a 6.3mm mono plug to connect them. The connecting cables all branch from a single-connector other end that is connected to the controlling unit via a couple of screws.

The mesh pads have just a single piezoelectric element, connecting to it a "foam bridge" visible through the mesh. The hits register much harder nearer the element, but in practice it didn't seem to matter much. Opening a pad reveals that the base of the pad has places for multiple screws in the middle. I've seen in some more expensive pads a single piezoelectric element but with multiple foam bridges leading to it, averaging the hit power over the mesh. Hence it might be that the same pad base is used in more expensive models. The cymbals probably have a single piezo also. You also cannot mute the cymbals because of this, as they only detect hits, not pressure (which would be relevant if you pinched them between your fingers).

The drums seem to have a slight problem of hits not 100% always registering, be it a cymbal, a pad or a pedal. Fortunately it's not a common problem, and doesn't matter when practicing. But recording or performing it might be a real problem.

The drum stand is quite sturdy and has good build quality. I made some wooden keyboard holders for it and the stand feels sturdy enough. The throne (stool) is not included in the set. It's worth spending some money to get a good, sturdy throne - it makes practicing nice and comfortable.

Sounds

The stock sounds are in my opinion quite bad. They aren't of that great quality sample-wise, e.g. there might be some noise or they might just sound weird. The worst feature, however, is how unbalanced they are volume-wise. For example in some sample sets the cymbals are hardly heard, and there's no way to tune the balance. In the videos I go through all the stock sounds, and there's the intro video again but this time with the default drum sounds.

There's also some quite audible noise from the headphone jack. I got tired of it pretty quickly so it might actually be an issue when practicing. The sample is recorded from the headphone jack.

MIDI interface

The Alesis Turbo has a USB B type connector. It is seen by the computer as a standard USB MIDI interface. To see what kind of MIDI data comes out of it, I used ALSA RawMIDI ports via the amidi tool as follows:

1. run amidi -p virtual -d
2. connect the e-drum MIDI device to the virtual RawMIDI port

One important thing I noticed is that the hi-hat always sends the Open Hi-Hat note. The state of the pedal is sent as MIDI data just before the hi-hat note data. I have no idea how well this kind of behavior is supported in different DAWs and other software. I used Hydrogen to play the sound samples, but it didn't have support for such pedal behavior.

In the video I play the hi-hat with and without the pedal. From MIDI command tables and percussion key map, and by doing some hexadecimal to decimal conversion we are able to decode the debug data shown in the video as follows:

0x00 =   0 : "off"
0x04 =   4 : Foot Controller
0x15 =  21
0x1A =  26
0x1E =  30
0x22 =  34
0x24 =  36
0x2C =  44
0x2E =  46
0x32 =  50
0x64 = 100
0x7F = 127 : "on"
0x99 = 153 : Note ON Channel 10
0xA9 = 169 : Channel 10 Polyphonic Aftertouch
0xB9 = 185 : Channel 10 Control/Mode Change

Key 21 = Note A0 (on keyboard)
Key 44 = Pedal Hi-Hat
Key 46 = Open Hi-Hat

MIDI format: COMMAND DATA1 [DATA2]

B9 04 00 : Channel 10 Control/Mode Change, Foot Controller, Off
99 2E 24 : Note ON Channel 10, Key 46 (Open Hi-Hat), Velocity 36
   2E 00 :                     Key 46 (Open Hi-Hat), Velocity 0

B9 04 00 : Channel 10 Control/Mode Change, Foot Controller, Off
99 2E 22 : Note ON Channel 10, Key 46 (Open Hi-Hat), Velocity 34
   2E 00 :                     Key 46 (Open Hi-Hat), Velocity 0

99 2C 64 : Note ON Channel 10, Key 44 (Pedal Hi-Hat), Velocity 100
   2C 00 :                     Key 44 (Pedal Hi-Hat), Velocity 0
A9 2E 7F : Channel 10 Polyphonic Aftertouch, Key 46, Pressure 127
   15 7F :                                   Key 21, Pressure 127

99 2C 64 (no velocity change, it's always 0x64 = 100)
   2C 00
A9 2E 7F
   15 7F

99 2C 64 (no velocity change, it's always 0x64 = 100)
   2C 00
A9 2E 7F
   15 7F

B9 04 7F : Channel 10 Control/Mode Change, Foot Controller, On
99 2E 32 : Note ON, Key 46 (Open Hi-Hat <- still open!), Velocity 50
   2E 00 :          Key 46, Velocity 0

B9 04 7F
99 2E 26 (the velocity changes)
   2E 00

B9 04 00
99 2E 1A (the velocity changes)
   2E 00

B9 04 00
99 2E 1E (the velocity changes)
   2E 00

Therefore, to get the hi-hat working correctly, your software needs to react to the B9047F (foot controller on) MIDI message before playing the hi-hat note.

Hacking the sounds

Since I had the hi-hat pedal problem with Hydrogen, I had to do some transforming to the MIDI messages sent by the drums before they reach Hydrogen. For that I used the mididings software, which is a MIDI router and processor. I wrote a custom mididings script and a shell script to fire everything up, including a reverb using JACK Rack. The script files are also available on GitHub.

When I start the shell script and wait a couple of seconds, some applications and connections open up to my desktop: the shell script prompt, QJackCtl, Hydrogen, JACK Rack, JACK connections graph. Attached is a video how it looks in practice.

With the custom mididings script I can:

• Use the hi-hat pedal as it should work.
• Double the ride cymbal as a crash cymbal when hitting it hard. This could somewhat be done also by simply using a different sample for loud sounds, but the ride would cut the crash sample.
• Turn the hi-hat pedal into a double kick pedal and back (8 kicks to make it a double kick pedal, 8 cymbal hits to make it a hi-hat pedal). Although, the pedals are such bad quality I never eventually bothered to learn double kicking with them.

2023-12-06 update: hi-hat fix for macOS

A reader asked me if I knew of a general solution for macOS running on an M1 Mac. I did not, but I noticed there is a freeware software called MidiPipe and figured it might be used to do what I used mididings for. Turns out someone else had had the same problem and managed to fix it using a MidiPipe script. I'm including the script file also on my site for download here.

Conclusion

To answer the question in the title, are cheap electronic drums any good for learning to play, I would say the short answer is yes. Playing the drums requires so much fine-motorical skills and possibly re-wiring your brain to make your legs and arms play together - or not together - that it doesn't really matter that much what kind of equipment you use to practice that aspect of playing.

What is immediately obvious when compared to a real drumset is that the musicality side - e.g. nuances, different sounds and the playing feel - are severely limited by the drums being electronic, and the more so the cheaper the drums. That being said, for someone starting to play, I don't feel like those are the first in the list of priorities. The first in the list should be: is it fun to play? And for that I'd definitely answer: yes! And if you are tech-savvy, with a bit of work you will get a lot more out of your cheap electronic drums than you'd expect.