So many times in my life I have proven that, “You get what you pay for.”. On occasion yeah, I have found a super great deal for quality and price. But most of the times, no.
My very first set of drums was a Slingerland set from a pawn shop somewhere in Detroit and given to me by a friend of my mom. Sparkle blue and that was my experience in drums. Never replaced a drum head or learned anything about the drums themselves as I didn’t play them as much as I should have.
Marriage, life and military career came and went and I didn’t own drums but I still played when the opportunity arose. Which wasn’t often. Shocked my last wife by playing an MTV Drumscape (no that’s not me in the video) at Busch Gardens Williamsburg. Until then, she thought my skills were made up.
So it was many, many years since I owned a drum set of my own. It wasn’t until I decided to take back control of my insanely screwed up life, that I decided to get back into playing drums.
My first purchase of my own kit was a set of Roland TD-11KV with an extra tri-zone cymbal trigger pad. I did this as I was in an upstairs apartment. I played the hell out of it when time allowed.
In 2020 I finally bought an acoustic drum kit again. My Tama Imperialstar. Sadly because of apartment living, they stayed in their boxes for 18 months. Until I moved into a house where I finally had my son come over and teach me how to actually setup drums for real. Fifty-two years old and I finally learn this stuff 😑 But something was off. Way off. The snare drum would vibrate like crazy. Nothing we did would stifle the noise. The snare and most of the toms would lose tune quickly, which was insanely frustrating.
After a year plus, I realized that the introduction line of Tama drums are, in my opinion, garbage. Which is sad since my son plays Tama. Tama has a lot of great artists. But having a kit that is so poor has put the bad taste in my mouth for their products. So I researched other drums. I was going to go with SJC drums. But their decor for their kits is just not my thing and the cost was more than I could part with for just wanting to be a garage/studio/youtube musician.
Giving it much consideration, I decided to go with Sonor Drums. German made and when my new AQ1 Stage kit arrived, I was more than blown away with the quality of not only the build of the drums but with the quality of the hardware. This kit is super solid and heavy duty for being the more affordable line. It sounds and plays amazingly!
I’m still tweaking them but so far all the problems I’ve had with my Tama are gone with my Sonor. Problem I still have is time. I work a lot and share living with someone who sleeps days for working nights. Combine that and I get maybe 4-5 hours time to practice in a two week period.
Hoping to show off my new kit this summer.
