MPS-850 E-Drum Set : Great for the money

I bought this kit as a way of getting back into drumming after an absence of 10 years - and I'm so glad I did!

First thing that attracted me to this was the value for money aspect, a kit with all mesh heads, 4 tom pads, 2 crashes and a ride, and a real hi-hat mechanism, for this price? More than happy with it! When it arrived I was impressed how small it all packed down to, hardly any space wasted in the box.

Next is the hardware - it's actually pretty good. A double braced hi-hat stand? A reasonably good kick pedal? Included? Go on then! The kick pedal is easily adjustable and, one tightened to my liking, seems to be responding well. The hi-hat took a little getting used to for triggering correctly, but that's the nature of electronics I guess.

Sounds - they're ok. Be prepared to sit down with the manual and adjust the sensitivity, crosstalk, voices etc of all your pads to get it to a place where it mimics your kit well and grace notes are captured correctly. But you'll be well rewarded for your efforts. The menu system isn't too bad to navigate, once you understand the layout you can adjust pretty much anything quite quickly. I like the tuning aspect too, quite easy to go from a low, fat snare drum to a higher piccolo snare.

Only real cons for me is the restrictions placed on positioning things. I play a 1 up, 2 down tom arrangement with a second snare on the other side of my hats, so thought it would be easy to replicate this with the kit. When I set the kit up initially I found it too narrow across the front, the sides felt too cramped. So I swapped the longer side arms for the shorter centres (kudos that you can actually interchange them) and things felt a lot more natural. However in doing so my hi-hat is now directly in front of my drum module, and I've had to mount my second snare on the upright of the rack. But it works, now the module is set I only really need to adjust kits every now and again. It would be good if we could buy hardware sections separate, so I could get some longer arms to replace the short ones! Fittings seems robust, nothing's moved unless I want it to.

All in all a great little kit, awesome value for money and well worth consideration, even though it's not a brand name kit (there's nothing on there really advertising the fact it's a Millenium kit so you shouldn't feel embarrassed using a "budget" make).