By: Chris Hoover
For a long time I’ve wanted to get into recording drum covers and making good quality drum content to post online. But the struggle for most people, including myself, is this: money. Recording equipment is expensive. Really expensive. And like most people, I don’t have thousands of dollars to drop on building a studio and getting all the gear it takes to record drums.
That’s where the Yamaha EAD 10 comes in. It consists of a module, or brain, or whatever you want to call it, and a trigger. The trigger attaches to the rim of your bass drum, and it picks up the vibration from your bass drum and sends that signal to the brain. And what’s crazy is, the trigger has two built in microphones that act as overheads and pick up the rest of the kit. Now I get what you’re thinking. How can some little trigger with built in microphones sound that good, and especially for only 500 bucks? I need to spend thousands of dollars on microphones, recording software, and a good computer to get a good recording, don’t I? Well I’m here to tell you: NO!
When I first plugged the EAD in, popped some headphones in and listened while I was playing, I was blown away. The quality of recording that it picks up is simply insane, especially for what it is. And how easy it is to use is a whole other story. There’s 5 main knobs on the module. You have the overall volume, the music/click volume, and then there’s 3 other knobs which control the reverb, the effect (you can choose between a lot of different ones) and the trigger. This is a really nice feature because you can have the trigger on full blast, or if you really like the sound of your natural kick drum but want to add a little extra boost, you can blend your natural kick drum sound with a trigger. Along with all these features, they also have a numerous amount of presets that come built in which you can choose from.
My favorite thing about the EAD is just how easy it is to record with it. They have an app you can download onto your phone or tablet. In this app, you can upload songs to it and it will automatically put a click to the song. You can plug it into the EAD and play along to it with headphones, and then when you’re ready to record, you can record to your phone or a flash drive. How I do it, is I put a flash drive into the module, hit record on the module for audio and my phone for video. Once I’m done recording, I take the audio from the flashdrive, airdrop it onto my phone, put both of them into iMovie, sync them up together with the song, and boom. You have a drum cover with some killer audio.
I know recording drums can be expensive and somewhat of a daunting task, but trust me when I say the Yamaha EAD10 revolutionizes the game. With all the amazing presets built in, and the ease of using the module and recording with it, there’s no doubt that it is the BEST way to go when wanting to make videos with good quality audio on a budget. For $500, you can’t beat it.
Here's a link to one of my Youtube videos where I use the EAD10. Take a listen for yourself!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3bvvLG6MP4