As of May 2012, the world of being a drumming busker or street musician has changed for the better. With the advent of the XM Busker Series eDrum kits, and in particular the B18-9SR model, you are getting a world-class digital drum kit that is easy to carry around, and won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

The XM Busker Series B18-9SR eDrum kit is easy to travel around with, but don’t let its small size fool you – this baby packs a punch!

At just over 30kg including all of the necessary drums, cymbals and stands, the Busker Series B18-9SR eDrum kit will be easy to pick up and move when you find foot traffic in another location is more lucrative. Besides a low price and being so lightweight, the B18-9SR only takes up 1.1m x 1.1m of space, including the drummer’s sitting position. This means you can set-up on the footpath and still have room for pedestrians to walk by, not to mention for your money collection hat or cymbal bag.

Functionality:

It’s cheap, small and lightweight, but the true advantage of the B18-9SR is the amount of versatility it brings to such a minimalist drum kit. The B18-9SR comes with XM’s top of the line touchscreen module, so your basic 12” snare, 13” hi-hat, 10” tom tom, 18” bass drum and 13″ cymbal set-up has many options. It’ll literally blow your mind.

This B18-9SR has been expanded with an extra Floor tom. The 9S module has the ability to support up to 14 drums or cymbals if desired.

This tiny eDrum kit’s 9S module comes with 8 built-in drum kit sounds (Rock, Jazz, Pop, Effect, Funk, R&B, Metal and Percussion), which you can then mix and match sounds from. You can also download Wave files of your favourite sampled sounds (drums or other instruments), and add these into the mix.

Independently program up to 3 unique sounds on each instrument – snare and tom (drumhead, rim, rim shot), cymbal (edge, surface, bell, choke) and hi-hat (surface, bell, choke). Can you imagine how many sounds you could get out of a kit so small?

Program the rim shot on your snare as a cowbell, the rim as a Splash cymbal, and the drumhead as your favourite acoustic snare sound. That is just the snare! Now try three different cymbal sounds on the one cymbal: Ride on the bell, Crash on the surface and China on the edge. Why not download a 6-second drum loop onto the tom tom’s rim shot to play along to? The options are seemingly endless, and you can alter the sounds for each song you play.

9S Module:

Now for some of the magic of the advanced XM 9S module…this module has the ability to reproduce the subtle changes in sound between soft and hard drum hits, both in tone and volume. The result is the actual tone of each eDrum can be programmed to change for when you hit harder or softer, just like an acoustic drum skin’s tone changes when you hit it harder. Wow!

Secondly, the 18” bass drum usually has a single drumhead sound, but in Jazz and Rock modes a harder kick can be programmed (via sensitivity levels) to trigger a second separate sound: Too cool.

Note: A short message about the XM Busker Series B18-9SR eDrum kit’s little sister: the B10-8SR. At 28.5kg it is the lightest eDrum kit XM World has ever designed.

The smaller B10-8SR has the XM 8S module, a 10″ bass drum, 10″ snare, 10″ tom tom, 13″ cymbal and 11″ hi-hat.

Top view of a red XM Busker Series B10-8SR eDrum kit (B18-9SR’s ‘little sister’).

The XM Busker Series has been created for people who make their living by bashing out beats on the streets around the world. Turn a small drum kit into a big sound with XM’s new Busker Series.

By Jesse S. Somer, XM eDrum