Advantages: Great authentic sounds, feels like playing real drums
Disadvantages: knowing that if you had £5000 you could get a much better one

...I brought my Roland V Drums about a year and a half ago. I love them to bits. At the time, i couldnt afford them at all. However I played on a kit in a music shop and fell in love with them. I immediately promised myself to get a job and save up to get one. So, eventually I did. I still struggle now to understand the technology. You're hitting rubber and plastic pads, and real drum sounds come out... its increadible. Although the TD8 is not the most advanced kit in the series, it still does SO much. It registers how hard you hit the drums, where you hit the drums and they are really responsive. One of the major benefits of this piece of equipment is that you can play music into it to play along to. This can be very useful for practicing and picking up new things while listening to your favourite tunes! Also, its a great idea... Read review

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Advantages: Realistic drum sounds, inexpensive, can synchronise with MIDI equipment
Disadvantages: Expandability limited to user defined patterns

...The Zoom RhythmTrack RT-123 is a good quality and fairly inexpensive (about £120) drum machine. Aesthetically it looks good, with a very compact body (dimensions are 20cm * 25cm), and the unit has a hard, transparent blue casing. It can produce backing patterns made up of two drum tracks and one bass track. There are 297 preset patterns, providing a wide variety of popular rhythms - everything from Hip Hop to Stadium Rock! 99 additional patterns can be programmed in and stored by the user. You can create a backing sequence (song) with up to 99 patterns, and as many as 99 songs can be stored. The RT-123 comes with a demo song pre-loaded which gives a good indication of the type of output you can create with a bit of practice. The pads light up when the sound is played, which is useful for non-drummers, to see how the rhythms... Read review

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Advantages: Cheaper than competitors, cheaper repairs e.t.c
Disadvantages: Not as up to date as Roland V Drums.

...song bank so you can play along to about 100 different songs of different styles at different tempos, with a click track. It's great for practicing, and I soon hope to be taking it out gigging with my band. (Metalcore) Price for repairs is also very good. I'm slowly upgrading my V.2 and to buy a new kick pad costs £40. (Less than most yamaha basic kick pedals) and it can work with a double bass pedal. They are really great drums, and great for the price. Don't let Rolands few advances turn you completely off Yamaha. If you don't need to be able to set your cymbals to a 40inch ride. Then give Yamaha a shot and save yourself alot!... Read review

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Advantages: n/a
Disadvantages: n/a

...As brevity is the soul of wit and because I'm just off to beddie-byes before a night shift, I thought I'd tender this highly over-engineered (and probably the most miniaturised) entry for the judges' perusal. I like all cultural things Japanese, especially Haiku, so it would be remiss of me to do otherwise... *** Addicted to Ciao? Tip-tap on plastic. Click mouse. An IT red-eye. *** Now, as an op has a minimum of 120 words, you'll just have to put up with the following padding... padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding padding... Read review

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Advantages: Pearl Export is my choice
Disadvantages: none

...allow for this when buying a kit. It is also a very noisy instrument with very little control over volume ( except for buying practice pads). If you have fussy neighbours, forget it! I hope that has been of some use to some prospective drummer out there.... Read review

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Advantages: Cheap, feature-packed, responsive and great sounding; perfect for many standard professional needs and beginners who want to splash out. DD's have been manufactured for atleast a decade or so
Disadvantages: No match for an acoustic kit or VDrums, toyish looking, some minor irregularities in pad response and limitations to the in-built recording feature

...) - and electronic aided compositions (whether the end sound is more organic or not) are no longer a scarcity due to the slow progressive assimilation by dance music via crossovers and other sub-levels. I own an acoustic kit, and before I bought one I graduated to it via seeing if I would stick with this drum lark by investing in one of Yamaha's early DD machines, the DD9 (which after a decade since I bought it is still available as an as-far-as-I-can-see cosmestically modified DD20) back in the early 90's. It was by all means a borderline toy; fun for the kids but with considerable use for those who wanted simple practice percussion. Fast forward through the years and you'll see amongst other things that the DD55 already existed somewhere in between as a slightly less featured DD50 (now obsolete) that competed with the likes of Roland (not... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Best party game available. Drums are excellent. Put simply - its just very fun.
Disadvantages: Single player guitar/vocal careers may get boring. Drum pedal prone to snapping. Fairly pricy.

...noise reduction drum pads which can help to reduce the noise by about 50% - just make sure you dont buy felt pads as these can make the surface of your brand new drums hairy. Secondly, the kick pedal is notoriously weak and susceptible to snapping in two. If you fear that this is likely to occur, i suggest reinforcing your pedal - there are various ways of doing this (eg installing a metal pedal, adding dampeners to the underside of the pedal etc), and I recommend doing some research on this if you want to extend the lifespan of your drumkit. Overall Guitar and bass offer nothing new, just an easier version of guitar hero on the whole. Vocals are enjoyable, but by far the most rewarding instrument is the drums. However, when playing with 3 other friends all at the same time, the individual flaws of these instruments mostly disappear... Read review

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Advantages: Big pads easy to hit with a excellent solid build ,bright lcd ,note velocities
Disadvantages: its a midi pad controller so you will need a pc or laptop

...The akai mpd 24 is a great machine ,its a perfect subsitute for its older cousins the mpc series which are used by the likes of hip hop pioneering producer dr dre. This machine has no internal memory as a mpc but once hooked up to your pc or laptop it effectively becomes one with ease . The pads are from the mpc 2500 series and i recommend working it with FL studio or reason programs ,this midi pad controller gives you the ability to give your drums a more human feel and to trigger samples on the fly . The LCD display is bright easy to read and the main global knob allows you to flick through presets and adjust note qualities Theres so much to this machine and i recommend anyone considering to get the rival korg kontrol to go for this as its trigger sensitive pads allow for perfect beat composition. Any one considering to get a pad... Read review

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Advantages: environmentally friendly, organic, chlorine-free
Disadvantages: thin, leaky, not really 'super'

...This review is specifically about Natracare Super Ultra Pads. I've been really keen to find an alternative to bleached and plastic-y sanitary towels for a while now. And while I'm a fan of the idea of washable, reusable cloth sanitary towels, practically - and for the sake of saving my blushes - I am eschewing them (for the moment). I turned to what seems to be the next best thing: Natracare. Natracare are non-chlorine bleached, perfume-free, plastic-free and over 95% biodegradable. Great I thought and ordered some super pads with wings online. When they arrived I was pleased to see that they are packaged in a cardboard box and the individual wrappers are paper not plastic - excellent from an environmental point of view and because they are much quieter to unwrap than those with plastic wrappers (hurrah!). Upon looking at the pads... Read review

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Advantages: Excellent voice tone for A,B,C and 1,2,3 instruction, Teaches as child grows, easy to use, Attractive toy, great easy listening music, volume control, educational
Disadvantages: Can be overwhelming with all of the noise and lights at the same time, hard to keep Dad away from it (!)

...& the following, 2003 Silver Award, Nursery World Equipment Awards & 2002 Silver, Practical Preschool Awards, 2002 Gold Award, Good Toy Awards, in the UK. ~~ BOTTOM LINE ~~ If you were looking for a fun little toy which a baby and preschooler can share, this would be wonderful (although the sharing might not happen with that age!). Babies will have fun seeing it light up and preschoolers may actually learn a little something while practicing for the band! At the time of writing this review, the Leapfrog Learning Drum is available in Toys-R-Us for only £16.99.... Read review

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