I bought the Efnote 3x for two use cases. 1. songwriting / recording demos at home and 2. playing live for weddings. For these uses these drums are great, but there are some small annoying inconveniences.
Whats great about them.
For playing weddings there are some great features to this kit.
1. The drums are very portable for the most part. The toms and snare aren't very deep and stack nicely! All of the cymbals fit in my cymbal bag, they're thicker than metal cymbals and may not fit in all bags, but they fit perfect in mine.
2. The built in sounds are high quality samples. I was blown away with the sound from the kit. There are not as many sounds as in more expensive modules but there are plenty of usable sounds and no filler.
3. You have a stereo output built into the module, but you can change the routing in the module to have toms and overhead come out of the stereo out and with the addition of a Y spliter (bought seperatly) you can have the kick and snare on their own outputs. This is great for the wedding band I am in as we can quickly adjust the kick and snare during a show on our PA systems mixer if needed.
4. Having played some older Yamaha and Roland electric drums I have always been disappointed with the responsiveness of the hihats closed, open and semi-open states. The Efnote 3x hihats are the best electric hihats I've ever played. They're 14" and play very similarly to real metal hihats. I still need to adjust my playing slightly but this is to be expected. As a drummer I can tell the difference, but the rest of the band can't tell the difference when I play these through the PA system.
For recording / songwriting there are more great features!
1. Over USB you can record 8 channels of audio and record all of the midi information. This is great for making use of the internal sounds and supplementing with additional drum samples in a DAW. This was a big factor in me going with Efnote over other brands.
2. The pads are super quiet, the hihats when open are probably the loudest part, but you can talk over the volume with no problem. I was practicing / recording a little last Sunday with these early in the morning. My partner was asleep in the room directly above where I was playing and slept perfectly without waking up over the noise. Some electric drums from other brands I've played with rubber pads or harder rubber cymbals have made much more noise! The mesh on these is super quiet and the cymbals rubber is not as hard as some other brands, helping to keep the noise down.
3. The amount of pads and cymbals for the price with this kit beats any other kit I've looked at. The 4 toms allow you to make full use of ezdrummer's or any other vsts sound when recording.
Theres a few places where Efnote could improve!
1. The kick drum pad's legs do not fold in, if you are transporting the drum kit, which I do for weddings, then you must remove the legs from the pad. This is made harder by two rubber rings on the legs. Efnote should make the legs fold in like on any other acoustic kick drum.
2. Connecting the clutch to the top hihat cymbal is hard to do, the underside of the cymbal doesn't leave much room to screw the nut onto and off of the clutch. I've decided to leave the clutch permanently attached because of this. This also make it an issue to transport the hihat in a cymbal bag. Efnote should make the underside of the top hihat cymbal easier to gain access to the clutch.
3. The tripod like stands that come with the kit are great if you want to leave the drums permanently set up for practice, but if you need to move the drums often, as I do for weddings, they are difficult. The two silver legs on each stand bolt on using a drum lug. They, like the kick drum pad legs, do not fold in to make transportation easier. You need to unscrew the drum lug to remove the leg, making the bold easy to lose. Efnote should either make the legs of the stand fold, or provide normal drum kit hardware. I have some unused stands that I now use with this drum kit and I do not use the stands that came with it. The stands I use fold up nicely just like any other cymbal / tom stand.
4. Finally, it is hard to plug in the rim sensor on the snare drum, you need to force it in. This is a design flaw with the curve of the rim sensor. I think this is only a problem with the 12" version of the snare, I think the 14" version the rim sensor maybe easier to access. Efnote should make this easier to access. It's not a problem if you're setting this up permanently, but if you transport the kit often this becomes an issue. My solution was to make a small extension cable that I permanently leave plugged into the snare rim sensor to make it more accessible.
To conclude, this drum kit is a great purchase with a small few annoyances. After using this for 2 weddings so far it sounds amazing live with the built in sounds. I've used it for practice / recording and found the multi channel recording + midi to be very useful and it triggers great. I would love to see efnote improve on the points I've mentioned above but the issues are not a deal breaker for me. Even with the issues mentioned the Efnote 3x still delivers above expectations!
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