Alesis Nitro Mesh Kit - Making Custom Kits, Floating Drum Riser and Tips

Hey YouTube, I'm Justin, take demon sweaters, yeah, sitting behind me, here's my Alesis Nitro Mesh electronic

drum

set and after having it for about a week, I'm going to go over some of my

tips

, observations and basically little

tips

I can give . If you plan on purchasing one of these, just my general opinion so far, here we go, okay. Like I said, I bought at least this

nitro

mesh

about a week ago. Actually, it's almost a week, six days and I've been playing. It's crazy and I really like it overall. I think it's great. You may have noticed that I already did a song with it and if you check out my other videos and haven't seen it yet, you can check it out.

I'll post a link. below as well, so my general opinion is that one of the things that you will notice when you first buy this kit or at least I noticed is that a lot of the built-in sounds that you know are the built-in

drum

kits

that come with it, the high . The hat sounds are quite loud and this is something that is a bit annoying actually because you would never mix the drums like this on the recording and you know that basically the drums, the hi-hat cymbals are not as loud as, for example, the box and one.

One of the common problems with pre-programmed kiss presets from standard

kits

is that the snare sounds louder or sorry, the snare is quieter than the hi-hat, the hi-hat seems to be louder than the snare or louder than the kick drum. . and all to fix it, it's actually quite simple, what you're going to do is create some of your own

custom

kits, which is very easy, just select one of the kits that you like and then start editing the parameters. In the module here, what you can do is press the voice key and then once you press the voice key, you can move on to the next button, which will be the page selection, and you can start selecting the different parameters that you want adjust and the one that you'll want to adjust for the hi-hat volume, basically just press the hi-hat pressure button and then press select page until you see the volume and then lower it using the arrow keys.

I usually set my hi-hat to around 20 or something by default, I think it's at 30 which is a little higher than it should be right now. The other thing I really like is creating my own

custom

kits and I'll show you how to do it. do that here in a second, as well as one thing: I was playing all last week during the week, you know, during the day with no real problems with my neighbors, however, yesterday I was playing on Sunday and my downstairs neighbor got mad enough and started hitting. the ceiling and I was like oh oh that's not good so one of the things you're going to want to keep in mind is the kick pedal and the hi-hat pedal create quite a bit of vibration on the floor so if you're in an apartment like I am and someone lives under you, you can piss them off because basically with this mallet hitting the kick pad it creates a vibration that goes straight to the floor, it just vibrates through the walls and basically just sounds like someone stopped it on the floor above them, so I don't know if this has totally fixed my problem yet, but I did some research and there seems to be a pretty common concern about this with electronic drums and there is a lot of information on YouTube and other places about how to create a drum lifter. sound insulated and one of the things that people use a lot is something where they basically just take two pieces of plywood and then sandwich some tennis balls in between and I thought that seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to be able to do and not so expensive, but giving them since I'm in New York City I have very limited access to tools.

I don't have a car and even getting tennis balls is quite difficult. where I am located there is no place near me that has tennis balls, the closest place would be Target so I would have to take the subway there and go there to buy some tennis balls, however there is a Lowe's within walking distance distance from here, so I was able to get the plywood from Lowe's and then there are these little stores called 99 stores that are all over Brooklyn everywhere and they're like they're family owned and operated and they have a lot of junk in there.

So I thought maybe I would go over there and see if I could find something that could replace the tennis balls that you know to use for the drum sound isolation

riser

, so what I did was I went over there and I found some things that actually, I'm going to do a flashback in time. I made a little video while I was doing this on my cell phone and I'm going to show you how I did it and then when we're done with that, we'll be back to show you how to create your own custom kits on the Nitro

mesh

and then yeah, okay, so this is it. my plan.

These are the dryer balls that I bought basically at the 99 cent store down the street and a lot. A lot of people do this with tennis balls but there is nowhere near my house I can get tennis balls so to save myself a trip I thought I would visit the 99 cent store and found these and I think they might work. they might actually be better because there will be even less surface contact with these little prickly things that they have and they were cheaper than tennis balls and then I went to Lowe's and got a sheet of pressboard and had them cut it to size.

The size of my mat there so let's see how it works I hope it's good because I really don't want to bother my downstairs neighbor any more than I already have and yeah the man who carries that stuff from Lowe's Lois is about two miles. from here and carried them on top of my head. I just walked, which was crazy. I'm in a lot of pain right now. Okay, so there's my dryer ball setup and I don't know if I'm going to need any more. I don't think so, they are quite sturdy, but I don't know if I will have to secure them somehow.

I'll try it without them so I can move them and take them apart if necessary and change things, hopefully the weight. I'll just keep it together. These boards are pretty heavy, so I'll see how it works. It actually works quite well. I actually feel some vibrations when entering the floor, but it seems to wobble a little. So what? What I'm going to try to do is I'm actually going to do it and it's quite a bit taller than I would like it to be, so I think I'm going to cut those balls in half and then I'll have. put a few more underneath or double that underneath to give it a little more support as well as lower the weight a little or lower the height, more like just a little so cutting them in half was definitely the solution. way to go because now that I have it I don't want to pick it up, but there are nine underneath basically all in the row where you see those three and those three.

The great thing is that I have three left over and that way I can put them. between the boards on the wall, that way I'll absorb any impact that hits the wall too, so this should be really good. I think it's going to be great, so there's the full

floating

drum lifter or the insulation lifter and if I go really low here, you can see half of the dryer ball down there and there's nine total, like I said, between the two pieces. of particle board and then three against the wall, that way if it starts to slide forward, there is no vibration from the wood on the wall itself, which as you would know creates such a serious problem.

I made all the rest of the video you're about to see with this setup and it's working great. I haven't had any complaints so far. I can definitely tell the difference if I put the bass drum on the floor versus being up on the

riser

and if I put my hand on the wood floor, you know, next to the riser while I'm playing. I can't really feel the bass drum, I sort of can, but before it was like I was stomping on the ground, so it's like a very, very big difference. I think this will really make a big difference, so let's get back to the rest of the video.

Okay, so let's talk about creating some custom drum kits. I have some custom ones that I already made right here and I'll show you how I can imagine a couple of things that are actually pretty interesting and one of the things, well, let me just play around a little bit and you'll see what I mean, okay, as you can see , I have a ride cymbal assigned to this pad here now. I play a four piece kit when I play acoustic drums normally, so for me this is pretty good. and then that allows me to have two crashes here and here, so it basically expands your set a little bit and you know, that gives me like I said it's basically like a four piece drum set.

Okay, now let me go over a couple of ways you can do this now, basically what I'm doing here. I have some custom kits that I already made, but what you can do is find one that you like in the standard drum kits here, so let's review, now on to number one. You will see, as I said before, how strong the hi-hat is in this first kit. I mean, it's incredibly loud, so let's use this as a base to start creating our own kit. So what am I going to do first? Let's lower the hi-hat and sorry for the angle.

The way I have my set up is that the hi-hat is a little bit above the module, so I had to tilt the camera. It's kind of fun for you guys to see everything, but let's go ahead and press the vocal up here, it's the top right button and then we'll go to a number right here, we'll just press the hi-hat and now. you'll see H C or H - Co one, so it actually means hi-hat combo number one, so we could change that sound if we want, let's listen to the other ones, okay, I like that one, so let's go with hi-hat combo number seven. now we're going to press page select here and you'll see that we have the volume level right there, so like I said, it's at thirty, which is too loud for the hi-hat, so let's turn that down to 19 or 20. that sounds pretty good. okay, so another thing we can do here now.

I'm not crazy about this rimshot sound for me, it's too crisp, so what I've been doing is a couple of different things now. get rid of the rimshot all together and put the same sound on the box like here, this is a page, let's press one more time or a few more times, let's go to the number again, so that's number 52 and this is number 53, like this So what we could do is put this at 52 again and it's a little bit louder, which is already better for me as a more natural sounding drum set than having that really incredibly sharp attack rim sound, so I'm not really crazy about it now. to show you something else you can do with this here in a second, but let's continue with this kit, okay, one more thing you can do, let's just press page selection again and pan, don't mess with that yet, the tone , you can actually change the tone. from the drums now reverb, what I want to do is lower the snare reverb, lower the kick to lower all the bottom hi-hat, I'm going to leave it dry, oh yeah, we need to adjust my snare too, okay, now that kick drum.

I'm not crazy about that kick drum sound, so let's get back to our number here. Part of this is also finding a sound that complements the other sound, so now that sounds pretty good to me. I want to adjust the reverb level, even though it's already on. also, so okay, now let's play with our Tom sounds, let's go ahead and leave these Tom sounds as they are, but let's change the tones and the pan, so I'm going to keep pressing page selection and for the first time . rack time I'm going to move it quite a bit to the left, second rack Tom.

I'm going to leave the center, third rack Tom, we're going to move quite a bit to the right, not too far now I'm also going to change the pitch on these two. Okay, and now on this one, I'm going to change it to a ride saucer, so let's keep pressing the slider until we get to the number and start the ride at 200 somewhere. I think it's like 216 or something, oh, something else. So I'll give you a link to a full list of all the sounds because it's not included in the Alesis manual. Here we go: 17s where the journey begins and that one sounds interesting, but the tone is quite strange. very low, so raise it up a little bit and then I want to increase the volume of the ride, now let's change that shock, okay, and then let's change this ride to a shock, okay, I'm very happy with those sounds, so I'm going to continue and save it, to do it is quite simple, we simply touch save and then go up to the position where you want to save it.

We're going to go to 32 because that's one of my open spaces. Still, press Save again. The boy is saved, now let me show you some other little tricks that occurred to me when I was doing this. Another one is okay, so this kit I was designing more like an electronic hit and one of the things I did here. is that I left all three shelves on, stroll here, crash here, but I have a touch here in my snare rinse, so I could do things like this to give you the idea that the snare is the only two-zone pad in the kit, but it is not.

It's really a hindrance in my opinion as having a second zone isn't always a good thing honestly, especially if you know you're trying to get a consistent snare sound on such a small pad, which is why a lot of times I just set thesound is the same sound, but if you want to do something special like this, it's cool to do it too now another one, okay, now like this one, if we look at these two different snare sounds, on this one I made a rim sound. here but you will notice the tones and this is something a little strange with this module the tones are a little separated from each other but they were a lot.

Before it was worse if I go into the voice and then into the tone we look at the box without the wing. The pitch is set to zero, but if I look here on this one, you know the ring is minus four if I set it back to zero, it's different, listen. two completely different pitches minus four is the closest it would be, unfortunately there is no tuning adjustment, but I think with this you know that one is close enough that in a mix you can't really notice it, so sometimes you have to go . If you're

making

two different sounds on your snare, you have to go in and manually adjust the pitch to make it sound better, oh yeah, one more quick tip I forgot to mention about the hi-hat, the hi-hat on the outside. of the box is a little bit flexible, it's kind of what I mean by that it just moves a little bit when you play it because it only has one felt right now, an easy way to fix this is to just add a second felt. which is what I did here and that makes this flop less blocking, meaning when you first set it up, compared to these other two cymbals, now the cymbal field is okay, you actually know that they are small, but when you're playing and you get into it, you don't even realize, they feel like you know what they're pretty decent, so that's all this video about Alesis Nitro Message drums now I love it, if you're thinking.

If you buy one, I recommend it for $350. This is the best electronic drum set. I think you can buy it in that price range. It is very solidly built. The sounds are good. They are not top of the line, but if you make a mistake. with them a little bit and playing there, they're great and I like the kind of electronic music, it doesn't sound some way, I don't know if that's a word, but I don't really like electronic drums that try. sound too much like real drums because in my opinion they never do, or if they do they sound a little cheesy, like they're too polished or too perfect, in my opinion I like a set that sounds a little obviously electronic if I'm playing electronic equipment, but it's just me.

I'm kind of a nerd, but overall it's a great team. Get yourself a good pair of headphones. I'm using the Samson sr 8 50 on a mile. I have a few different headphones. I have some Yamaha and some Technica audio but these are great for the price, the headphone output is not as loud as some people would like. I pretty much leave it on all the time, but for me it's loud enough and then another. What you do is when you're recording, like now I have two quarter inch outputs on my computer that I was recording audio with.

If you're doing something like that, you can just listen to the headphones through your computer and turn the volume up much higher. There are also other ways to increase the volume. You can use something like a headphone amp if you don't want to, but overall I think it's loud enough. Some people complain about that or that, but for me. It's okay anyway, thanks for watching. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know below and check out my other videos. Subscribe, like and click any of the links if you can. That will help me a lot. a little bit and you know, if you want to listen to my music, you can too, so anyway, thanks for watching everyone and have a great day.