The E-Monster Is Waiting

I am definitely a drummer at heart. Give me a table and two hands and this becomes obvious fairly quickly.

The dream of building a serious electronic drum kit goes back to around 2005. Nearly twenty years of looking at kits, imagining layouts and mentally adding one more pad because restraint apparently belongs to other people.

Eventually the thing existed. Enough drums, cymbals, pedals, cables and hardware to deserve a name: the E-Monster.

Connected to Superior Drummer 3, it sounds amazing. The kit has the physical vocabulary I wanted and access to a ridiculous studio of sounds through software. It can be intimate, enormous, clean or filthy within seconds.

The problem is time. I finally have the kit I wanted for almost two decades, and I barely play it. There is something sad about finally owning the instrument you dreamed about and treating it like furniture.

I thought about selling it. It takes space, and equipment should probably be used. Then I imagined watching it leave and discovered that I could not stand the idea.

So it stays. I hope the part of my life with enough free time for music arrives soon. Until then, the E-Monster waits in the corner, fully armed and offensively patient.