Mesh Electronic Drum Kits

For a long time since their introduction into the electric drum set world, the high-end feel and quality of a mesh drum head were only available on the absolute top spec electronic drum kits, which were several thousand pounds to buy and out of reach for most drummers. Not anymore.

Buy Mesh Head Electronic Drum Kits

A mesh electronic drum kit offers a very different playing experience to the more common rubber pad drum head design you will find fitted to the majority of sub £800 electric drum sets on the market.

A great example of a rubber pad style kit would be the best-selling Carlsbro CSD130R, which brings you an 8 piece electronic drum kit with a fully-featured MIDI drum machine. It's an amazing drum set for the money, and its rubber pad heads allow it to be truly affordable at under £300, which otherwise wouldn't be possible.

The main difference between these lower-cost solid pad designs and a mesh head drum is the 'feel' of the material and how it reacts when being struck by the drum sticks, with many players finding it more of a challenge to swap between playing live on an acoustic kit and the hard rubber pads of the cheaper electric practise kits.

This isn't a fault of the pad style drum head at all, and these kits continue to be incredibly important tools for the once impossible silent home drumming practise, with their affordability and compact dimensions allowing so many beginners and established drummers the convenience of home rehearsal.

Mesh electronic drum kits have finally become affordable though, bringing their enhanced characteristics to the masses, with amazing value kits such as the market-leading Carlsbro CSD500, with its 8 piece kit featuring a 10” mesh head snare and 8” toms with dual zones to really provide that high-end performance for under £500.

Drummers will often talk about feel, or the 'response' of any drum kit being the deciding factor in its capabilities, and this is especially true for any electronic drum kit.

Why should I buy a Mesh Head Drum Kit?

A mesh head electronic drum kit is more defined than the regular kits on the market. These sets replace the solid rubber pads of the lower cost practise kits with a stretched fabric or synthetic canvas material, which is similar to an acoustic drum skin in both texture and feel.

These mesh skins are either pre-tensioned, or will have adjustable tension settings on some higher-end electric drum kits, both with the emphasis on capturing the right amount of rebound or bounce that's offered to the player. This bounce response is an essential ingredient for recreating the physical reactiveness of an acoustic drum kit, and is a major factor in why mesh heads are so desirable to drummers that switch between live work and home practise regularly. Solid pad drum heads simply can't reproduce the same sort of reactive response due to their hard structure and therefore require a certain amount of adaption in playing style to accommodate their limitations over their more costly mesh head counterparts.

It's not just about feel though, as the electronic sensitivity and dynamics are also significantly enhanced on a mesh head drum kit, with the ability to pick up the nuances of ghost notes, rim shots and techniques like cross-stick, which a solid pad drum head simply cannot detect or reproduce due to the nature of its design.

These extra dynamics and inputs obviously require more sophisticated processing, therefore the drum machine ‘brains’ that come with mesh head drum kits are much more advanced than those on pad head kits, which is also a factor in the higher purchase cost.

What is the best Mesh Drum Set?

One of the more higher spec drum machines can be found in the superb Commander 600 module that's included with the amazing Carlsbro CSD600 electronic drum kit, a 9 piece set with tension adjustable mesh head snare and toms with full voicing adjustment and 30 complete preset drum kits to choose from. This advanced drum module works with the mesh heads to bring the most subtle of strikes and muted hits to life with ultra accuracy, which transforms the user experience and makes these higher-spec Carlsbro kits suitable for professional recording and performance work.

Mesh head drum kits, such as the Carlsbro CSD600 prove to offer an advantage over its pad-style counterpart, which is the physical size of the drum heads themselves. The mesh drum heads here are in a variety of sizes that are often much closer to that of an acoustic kit. Drummers can often struggle to adapt to the size difference from an acoustic kit to the often quite small pads of electric drum sets, and the uniform size of those pads in every position. This can also make it very difficult for those that have started out on an electric kit to transfer their skills to acoustic kits when the time comes, which is obviously frustrating, so the more realistic dimensions of a mesh head electronic drum kit makes them both desirable, and a smart choice for long term usability. Most standard electric drum kits will have snare pads of 7 to 8-inch diameter, which is a decent size, whilst retaining the folding design and outright portability, but is obviously quite a reduction from the 14” (360mm) of an acoustic snare.

If you're looking for a more midrange mesh drum set, the Carlsbro CSD500 sees the snare drum come in at a nice 10” diameter, with 12” cymbals and 8” toms, which gives that extra breathing space across the kit for the drummer to stretch out and practise techniques that just aren't possible on lower specification practise kits.

We have worked with Carlsbro for many years and our customer comments have helped them to create an excellent product that genuinely rivals the large drum companies without the hefty price tags.