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This is my first review of a drum kit. I started playing drums three years ago when I was 10, and I got the 2Box Drumit Five two years ago, I use the Drumit at home to practice, and I have a weekly lesson in school with an acoustic kit, so I play on both regularly.
2Box is a company based in Sweden, and so far their only product is the Drumit Five, so before they made this kit, they were unknown in the world of music. This surprised some people as the kit’s sound quality and aesthetics are surprisingly good. The Drumit Five is an “open-sound drum system” meaning that the users can import their own .wav sounds or loops to play on the kit. With the ability to import your own sounds, people were expecting the built in samples to be lacking, but people still have an option to use the 100 built in pre-recorded kits to play that are stored in the brain module’s 4GB of flash memory. There are also 23 WAV files that you can play along to, all having a resemblance to a real drum kit, and each kit is made up of 24-bit, 44.1khz multi-layer samples.
Build
What makes Drumit Five different from most other electronic or acoustic drums is the fact that people can use whichever heads they prefer, rubber, mesh or standard acoustic mylar heads work. People can customise a kit to their own preferences and not use a standard setup. It also strikes people as different because it has a black and orange colour scheme.
2Box tried to make the Drumit Five feel like a regular drum kit, without sacrificing quality. This meant that the construction of the kit was quite difficult, despite that it is described as “Lightweight and easy to set up”, they accompanied the kit with a 15-page manual on how to put it together, making it easier for everybody; such a large manual is not always a good thing, though.
In my kit, the three tom pads are 10 inches in diameter, the snare is 12 inches and the kick drum 14 inches. They all come with mesh heads which feel very much like real drum skins to play. The rims are hard plastic over, I’m guessing, metal underneath.
The bass drum pedal looks almost like a tennis ball on a stick, and it is rather bouncy when it strikes the mesh of the bass drum. This does make the kit feel slightly less like a real one but should not affect the playing too much
I got an extra cymbal so I have a 12 inch Hi-Hat, and three 14.5 inch cymbals which I use as a ride cymbal and two crashes.
The leads are a good length, come with labels (this is actually important for identifying which lead is for which drum), have a straight connector at one end and an L connector at the other.
 
The setup is relatively easy, takes just a little time to put together like a standard drum kit. The Drumit Five comes with its own set of proprietary hardware, including a mounting rack, hi-hat stand and a bass drum-pedal. The snare is also placed on its own stand, giving the flexibility of placement which you have with all drum kits.
The rack is solid and has the same type of ball-and-socket mounts as my Dad’s Gibraltar rack for his drums.
With each pad there are two separate sensors, one for the main head and one for the rim of the drum to allow a person to play a rim-shot, or to add their own sound to each rim. A cymbal however has 3 sensors for the edge, bow and bell. The cymbals can also sense when somebody grabs the edge of it with their hand after a strike to stop its sound (This is called a “choke”). A problem that can sometimes happen with the kit is when you are playing with a lot of force, it can sometimes shake the kit and trigger some of the other sensors, but it rarely ever happens and can be easily fixed by changing the sensitivity in the settings.
2Box tried to make a kit that is as close as you can get to a real acoustic kit, without having loud noise that would disturb the neighbours. I would say that they succeed in making this kit sound and feel like an acoustic kit, except for the cymbals and hi-hat feel rubbery when you hit them.
The Module
The module is quite small and has lots of buttons on the front that can be used to do many different things, for example there is a button for each individual drum, so you can play on the kit by pressing the buttons. There is also a “more” button, which when pressed with one of the toms or snare, plays a rim-shot. On the back of the module, there are several jacks for each of the drums, inputs and outputs.
The module has inputs for 10 pads - four toms, three cymbals, kick, snare and Hi-Hat.
Using the menu
When you first open the options all of the information seems too complicated to try to understand, but if you look at the manual (Physical or electronically on their website) it should all be understandable relatively quickly. The FAQ is quite vague or does not explain the answer completely and does require some looking around in the menu to find. An example of this is on the FAQ of their website:
"How do I save my changes?"
Make sure the Save parameter (write-protect) on the UNIT-PREF is set to On.”
This just means that you have to go to the unit tab, on the left, and scroll down through the pages until you come to the “PREF” page. From here you just need to click the button above the word “Save”. From here figuring out the other options should be a lot easier.
The titles that are on the UNIT section are:
· MIX - This is a mixer that lets you balance out the volume levels of the drum channels. There are nine “FADER"s that you can control individually. You can change the Kick (Bass drum), Snare, Hi-hat, Toms, Cymbals, FX, Line and ACMP (changing the volume of the metronome or song).
· TRIG – Here you can change the trigger settings for the pads, and the parameters on this page are important if you wanted to hook up acoustic triggers or other pads from different manufacturers.
· HPED – This page is all about editing and adjusting the hi-hat, and is worth looking at if you want the hi-hat to work properly, as you can calibrate the hi-hat and adjust many things such as the sensitivity.
· INTF – This page lets you see how many (sound) zones are assigned to a trigger channel, with the number of zones meaning the amount of MIDI notes being used for a channel, and you can set the MIDI channel for the transmitting or receiving of MIDI signals for each drum channel.
· OUT – This just lets you customise the output of the Drumit Five, and change which signal goes to which jacks, or if you wanted to connect a mono signal to the line-in jack.
· VU – On this page you can see the signal level of the line input and output channels from LED meters.
· METRE – This page lets you change the sound settings of the metronome, with the changes that you make affecting all of the KITs. You can change the pitch of the sound, and other options affecting how the metronome will play.
· MIDI – This page lets you change the global MIDI settings.
· PREF – Here you can change the preferences of the kit, with the example earlier on “Using the menu” It lets you change various things such as whether you want any changes you make to be saved permanently, or you can change whether you want the menus to be displayed horizontally or vertically.
· MEM – On this page you can read all of the information about memory usage and how many files are stored on the brain, and how much free space you have on the 4GB of flash memory.
· INFO – This page just gives you information about the software version of your module, the buttons do not change anything about this page.
A full description of these pages is available at http://www.2box.se/download/pdf/DrumIt_Five_Manual_1_2x_eng.pdf where you can find out what each of the pages does in more detail, on pages 45 - 63
Price
Right now (February 2015) The Drumit Five’s price comes in at £1,599 from Scan.co.uk (where Dad bought it), and £1,687 from Amazon including VAT. But it is worth it? A Roland flagship TD20XK can cost up to £6000, and there are many differences in the two kits, but they both try to play like a real kit, and sound like one, so 2Box is probably worth the money if you are a beginner or have a smaller budget.
Conclusion
I think that Drumit Five is for somebody who wants a drum kit that makes them feel like they are playing an acoustic kit, while giving them ability to play it like an electronic kit, so they can play their own silly sounds or have it sound like any drum kit if they wanted. Drumit Five is probably one of the best kits in terms of its price and its quality. It is also usable if you wanted to just set it up and play, you don’t have to change the settings or optimise the sensitivity of drums or the hi-hat, but it is recommended that you do. Drumit Five is good if a parent wanted to buy one for their child, it is also a good kit for beginners and experienced players.
Dad’s opinion
Being someone who used to play weekly gigs using an Alesis D4 brain and a large kit of Simmons hexagonal pads and real cymbals in the 80’s and early 90’s, I’m astonished at the advances that electronic drums have made. The mesh heads and chokable cymbals are fantastic. What I’m impressed with most is how the Hi-Hat is now a very decent substitute for the real thing. I chose the 2Box for Scott because it represents a good compromise between realism (the feel of an acoustic kit is paramount), flexibility and value.
A video of somebody doing a demo of the drums, with a few extra cymbals and showing off the “choke” on them, using all of the drums to show you how they all sound can be found here. |
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25-11-2019 21:20:17
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