Drums and Cymbals
My first kit was a Percussion Plus standard size (22x17, 12x9, 13x10, 16x16, 14x6) drum set that lasted me for almost ten years. It was a great set and if you are starting out, I would reccomend those drumsets for price and quality. I also reccomend two extremely good drum companies to buy from. One is Yamaha Drums, which i am pleased to own, and the other is Sonor Drums. Both are equally good and both high end and low end kits sound fantastic but i tend to lean toward Yamaha because of the Tour Custom, which, in my opinion, is the best buy/steal on the market. It is by far the cheapest all maple shell kit in the world and with the right heads sounds like kits triple the cost. My preference for heads are as follows: Remo Coated Ambassadors on the snare, Evans G1 Coated heads for the toms, and Remo Fiberskyns for the bass drum on both sides. I like them tuned middle to high, especially in the bass, ala Bill Stewart. I also tune them close to the same tone on both heads to get more tone out of the drum giving it a raw quality. For cymbals, I love what I have right now. The Bosphorus was picked out for me by Jim White and it has a beautiful wash and clear tone and is really easy to groove on with a band. The Sabian is my favorite of them all. It sounds great behind just about everything and the rivets add so much color to the sound. The Dream cymbal is also a personal favorite. It fills up the space with more color then I could have though with rivets. It is also another steal usually going for half the price of similar cymbals on the market. The 18" is a presonal creation from the first batch of cymbals I got with my old kit. I recommend doing it to save money and just adding some rivets to it. You get a great trashy crash quality. It works for rock, or as a small china cymbal. And you can never go wrong with New Beat Hi-Hats. Just about everybody has them and they work for every style. I also really like Istanbul Agop cymbals. Every set of cymbals they have have a decent amount of trash to their sound and nothing in the world sound close to Istabuls. I generally used the hardware that comes with the drumset, but my favorite is Tama hardware because they are high quality and cheap in comparision to other companies.
Yamaha Drums
Bosphorus Cymbals
Sabian Cymbals
Mapex Drums
Zildjian Cymbals
Istanbul Cymbals
Cymbals Only: A site with sound files of the best cymbals
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