I picked these up from GameStop today, and I have to say I am thrilled with them. They cut the impact sounds down to, I’d say, about 30% of what they were before. I am also scoring better, I think because it makes quick hits/rolls easier to do.
Well worth the $20, I’d say. One note of caution: I have a newer set of drums (QM serial number). According to this guy, if you have an older set (EL serial), then they can have a disastrous effect on your sensitivity. You can check here to see what type you have.
Yep, this is on expert. I’m not quite up to RTTH yet, but I got my best ever score on Orange Crush just after picking them up. I’m not sure why it’s easier exactly, but it is.
I have these too, and put them on our office kit (which is the QM model). I still have rubberbands on the red pad to make it report fast rolls properly, but otherwise the pads didn’t really seem to cause any noticible drop in sensitivity and definitely reduce the noise level. I’d say for 90-95% of drummers they’d work perfectly fine.
Pretty nice. How do they compare to the unofficial “mousepad silencer rubber cemented to the drum pads” fix? That’s what I’m using now, and they work quite well, but if these are better I’d consider switching.
Although I haven’t actually tried putting mousepads on my drums, these pads are denser than most mousepads, so I would guess that they are better in terms of sensitivity. But that’s just a guess. They stay in place by being sticky on the back – you just stick them onto your drum pads. They definitely provide more bounce than the stock heads. I got a set for my friend Chris, who is a drummer in real life, and he was very excited about how much more normal they make the RB drums feel.
They have an adhesive backing that peels off. It’s kind of a one-time-use thing – they wouldn’t take much effort to remove from the drums, but you probably couldn’t just stick them on another kit.
I picked them up today, they work fairly well. My sock mod was somewhat quieter, but I was using thick wool socks and losing some sensitivity. For some reason the red drum is considerably louder than the rest, I may be hitting it differently though.
They look solid, from the pictures I’ve seen – are they neoprene or rubber or what? All you really need is a thin layer of neoprene or rubber to reduce drum noise substantially.
The only really bad drum silencers were those crappy foam / felt ones.
Crappity crap. I was having some trouble with my QM drum pads, so Harmonix sent me a new set - ELs. I should have read more before buying and opening my new drum pad silencers. I guess I’ll go ahead and install them and see how bad it is.
EDIT: It’s bad, especially on the red drum. I usually do pretty well on “Ballroom Blitz” on expert, and I was dropping notes right and left with the pads on. I even trimmed the red pad smaller so that it would fit inside the rim, and it didn’t help. Calling Harmonix now to see what they might do, since these are “official” Harmonix product.
