Best electronic drum kits for beginners: Affordable sets to get you playing

Drumming is one of the more visceral forms of creative expression, unbounded as it largely is from the strictures of harmony.

That said, it is no less an art, with dexterity, physicality, cognition and improvisation vital skills to the accurate expression of movement and energy. All this to say, drumming is an intense practice to learn – and one which brings with it a number of hurdles, not in the least of which is volume.

Drumming, artful as it is, has gotten a reputation as a somewhat anti-social practice. Drums are unavoidably and even intrusively loud, as many will discover as soon as their child, relative or neighbour catches the percussion bug. Whether you’re a parent buying for your newly-banging baby, a Whiplash-fuelled jazz hurricane aspirant, or simply a beginner looking for a low-stakes route to unintrusive practice, electronic drum sets are the way forward.

The electronic drum set is the result of decades of innovation and experimentation, starting as an avant-garde interface for new explorations in sound – by which I am of course referring to The Moody Blues’ seventh album.

Today, electronic drums are more than esoteric instruments. They are learning tools, expansive tour-guides through the rich world of percussion, and a catch-all cure for both Parent Ear Fatigue and Noise Abatement Notices.

In essence, an electronic drum kit consists of: a drum pad to receive your hits; a sensor to acknowledge those hits, their velocity and in some cases their position on the pad; and a central electronic module that governs which sounds are triggered by sensor information. Drum sets use these elements to build digital analogues of conventional drum kits, each pad triggering a pre-recorded or synthesised drum sound and playing it back through headphones or speakers. But no drum sets are built exactly alike, and there are a few things to consider when choosing the right kit for you.

A key example is the form each pad takes. Principally, there are two kinds of pad, being rubber and