More E Drums?

[Eric]

The car industry has changed. Almost every manufacturer has an SUV, some with a multiple SUV line up. This seems to be the way the market has changed.

Same for the drum market. E drums are huge and the biggest thing on the market! Why haven't all of the drum companies gotten into this market? Or maybe some of you out there know something the rest of us don't yet. There is always one pioneer and the rest follow with different variations. We can see this with the new Yamaha set up. Why isn't Tama, Pearl, Ludwig and the rest jumping into this market? Just a question for you all to ponder, or maybe one of you has the best solution to the perfect E drum alreay!

[BINARY]

I think it's still a very selective market, as popular as electronic drums may be, I'm not sure they're the "biggest thing on the market," and there's only so many people buying them.

I bet Pearl makes more in a week off of acoustic kit sales than Roland, Yamaha and Ddrum combined do from sales of electronic kits.

Someone (high up) in my company thought it would be a great idea to start a dot-com company that remains seprate but uses the same resources as the mother company.
It's not a small endeaver, especially if sales probably wouldn't ammount to all that much on the grand scale.


BINARY

[MPCman]

When someone wants to come up with a product like edrums, he has to do research to develop it. Roland and Yamaha didn't have to do very much research on the Brains, since they can copy very much technology from their synthesizers and samplers.

I don't think you can compare this to cars, since an edrum kit is not just a different type of drumkit, but it's a different building process as well.

[puttenvr]

Originally posted by Eric:
E drums are huge and the biggest thing on the market! Why haven't all of the drum companies gotten into this market?

They are not. Only a few people play e-drums. Unfortunately.

When the Simmons SDS V came out in 1981 almost all major drum companies made e-drums: Sonor, Gretsch (you won't believe), Tama, Dynacord, Pearl, Hohner, Premier (you won't ..) et cetera.

But when drummers turn their back on e-drums, they left. Thanks to Roland, Clavia and Yamaha we still have e-drums. But: it's a small market for now.

[sepdrums]

There are also patents to consider. The best idea by Boom Theory is well protected and they sure covered their bases when writing out the patent. The entire concept of triggering an acoustic drum from the inside is owned by Boom Theory. There are fine details like the use of mylar heads, number of heads, and other materials that limit it (which is how mesh headed drums like V-Pro's can exist legally). All others are either in violation or have purchased rights to liscense the technology - hence the DTXtreme. How do I know this?? I found out the hard way. SEP started out building edrums and did not look deep enough into patents. Needless to say my product didn't make it too far. Great ideas, but someone else already thought of it first. If you can't beat 'em, sell 'em.

There are only so many ways to trigger a drum with a piezo. It has been refined to the point that it would not be cost effective for another company to barge in now and try to make it. Companies like Alesis have just purchased Hart products and labled them. Maybe Pearl or DW will jump in the game by purchasing someone elses edrums and slapping a label on them..who knows. But I don't look for them to actually manufacture them.

IMHO until someone finds another way to get trigger signals other than the piezo, edrum technology on the pad side will remain stagnent. Sure, playing surfaces will improve, regress back to mylar heads, and then who knows where else. Drum modules will continue to improve exponentially, but I dont see much happening on the pad side.

Is there a better way to trigger a drum other than a piezo?? Probably not since a piezo is self powered... Fiber optics can send signals by sensing bends in light signals. It would be pretty cool to weave fiber optic strands into a mesh head. But that is huge money and probably overkill.

My $.02

Erik
SEP

[cliff]

Why hasn't someone figured out a way to make edrums cabless?

[puttenvr]

Not possible: the female singer will always stand between your drumpads and brain

[rus]

Originally posted by cliff:
Why hasn't someone figured out a way to make edrums cabless?

I'm working on it.

rus

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[This message has been edited by rus (edited January 09, 2001).]

[Eric]

Originally posted by puttenvr:

They are not. Only a few people play e-drums. Unfortunately.

I think it is a cost issue though. I think if more people could afford them, they would play them. And I'm talking about the real headed ones not the rubber ones. A v-custom or hart studio AX with a TD8 will run you around $2000 plus. A pearl export with cymbals will run you around $700 to $800. I think that the guys that can afford the high end acoustic kits are the ones seriously looking at the e drums. My guess is that most people would love to have a V-PRO.


Oh and one more thing, the statement about SUV's was just to set the stage for how markets change and how markets adapt.

[puttenvr]

I think the guys who can afford an high-end acoustic kit don't automatically look at e-drums. Perhaps here at www.vdrums.com are some guys around who have a high-end DrumWorkshop as well as a Vdrum kit, but that's not the standard in this world. I think.

I agree, that if e-drums were much cheaper perhaps more people would by them. But the main problem is that most of the drummers are quite conservative as long as news inventions, sounds, feel and appearance are concerned. Don't forget that even with acoustic drums some inventions already were made in the 1930s and acceptes 50 years later.