Maybe it’s time for churches to stop viewing electronic drums through the lens of 1980-90s technology and start evaluating whether they genuinely fit today’s worship environments.
I know that very statement almost immediately elicits opposite and equally passionate responses. I’ve written extensively on the issues related to controlling drum volume in worship environments, but I haven’t written specifically on e-kits. Maybe because I just didn’t want to be the guy wearing the pointy hat when the witch hunt for e-kit endorsers kicks off. But I think the time has come to have a conversation about why an e-kit may be the right move for your church.
Fire up the torches and pitchforks, because here we go.
If we’re being intellectually honest, there is a case to be made for e-kits in worship, but to understand that, we need to move past the stigma and reputation of e-kits as toy drums or as too unprofessional to be taken seriously.
Those familiar with my content may know that I started my career as a professional drummer. That may give me some level of credibility to speak on this highly controversial subject. In all my years of working in church audio, I’ve heard every argument on both sides of the debate. Having spent many years “on the throne,” so to speak, and now even more in “the seat,” I feel like I may have some insight and empathy for both the drummer and the audio engineer.
Full disclosure: back when I was on the road, the mere suggestion of playing an electronic kit, or playing a kit in a booth, would not have gone over well. The 1989 version of me had survived the octagonal Simmons 80s era and was not going to tolerate any more such foolishness. But 1989 me was pretty self-centered and self-assured. In all fairness, e-kits in those days were objectively terrible.
Fast forward to 2026. After many years of helping churches modernize their sound systems to keep up with increasingly aggressive drumming styles in production, along with some very advanced technology, yes, I have mellowed in my obstinance on the topic.
Who could benefit from an E-kit, Darth Vader?
In simple terms, if your drums are too loud for your environment, and you’re not willing or able to fully enclose the drum set, your church is a good candidate.
If your auditorium is less than 2,000 seats and you are trying to maintain a well-balanced, controllable mix at a reasonable sound level, say 85 to 92 dB or so, an e-kit is at least worth considering. Again, I’m painting with a broad brush here. Your mileage may vary, and all the other disclaimer language should be applied. I know churches much larger than 2,000 seats that still fully enclose their kits.
Drummers may still prefer acoustic kits, but improved feel and dramatically better sounds are making modern e-kits, like this one from EFNote, increasingly viable in worship environments.
But for the purpose of this discussion, let’s narrow the scope a bit and focus on smaller venues. Odds are, if your church seats less than 500 to 800 people, your stage is not huge. A full drum enclosure, which I almost always recommend given today’s modern worship style of drumming, can easily dominate the stage. I try not to get too hung up on looks, but at some point, particularly on small stages, a giant enclosure just looks silly.
I worked with a church once, and even though the stage was a decent size, we still called the drum enclosure the Death Star.
So if we can agree that on smaller stages the large, imposing full drum enclosure can feel a bit over the top, what other benefits can be gained from an e-kit?
Hey, I’m part of the team too!
Sacrifice and compromise are all part of being on a worship team. We all have to lay down something at the altar to serve the greater good. So while I discourage members who seem to put the “I” in team, I’ll give a little grace here when it comes to the drummer’s sense of isolation in the giant fishbowl. It’s easy to see why a drummer would feel disconnected from the rest of the worship team, not to mention the congregation itself.
Think how nice it would be, from the drummer’s perspective, to be able to speak with the rest of the team during rehearsals without a talkback mic, and better yet, to be able to make eye contact with the band or worship leader without his own reflection staring back at him.
A pleasant side benefit of the e-kit over the enclosure is that, from a lighting and video perspective, the stage can be more symmetrical, easier to light, and easier to frame for camera shots.
Like most things in our world, you get what you pay for.
If you’ve ever researched e-kits, I’m sure you’ve noticed the wide range of costs. The two main factors that separate the cheaper units from their pricier counterparts are the drums and cymbals themselves, and the number of outputs. Higher-quality, more realistic, responsive heads, along with somewhat more tactile cymbals, are usually features of the higher-end kits. Those are things that, as a drummer, would be very important to you, and you pay a premium for that level.
From an audio perspective, the number of outputs available is a high-value part of the decision process. Many manufacturers actually feature the same library of sounds throughout the various price points or “trim lines” of their kits. The extra cost often provides more granular control of the sounds and more routing options.
As an audio engineer, when e-kits started featuring 10, 12, or even 16 outputs, I became much more open to their use. On a traditional live drum kit, I’m usually working with 8 to 12 channels: 1) kick in, 2) kick out, 3) snare top, 4) snare bottom, 5) hi-hat, 6) rack tom, 7) floor tom, 8) overhead left, and 9) overhead right. When I can have that level of control on an e-kit, that’s a win.
Some of the less expensive kits may have the exact same sounds in the main controller, commonly referred to as the brain, but only offer 2 or 4 outputs. That makes mixing the kit much more limiting and forces everyone to deal with multiple drum sounds combined into the same channels. Some of the higher-end kits also offer the ability to load samples or trigger other sounds.
I’m a simple man, easily satisfied with the best of everything.
Given the better-quality, more realistic, responsive drum heads and cymbals on the higher-end e-kits, along with the multiple outputs, it should be no surprise that my recommendation is this: if your budget allows, you should aim for the more expensive kits. Again, in many cases the drum sounds themselves will be the same, but your drummer may be more frustrated by plasticky-feeling drums and cymbals, and you’ll have to work harder and make more compromises if you cannot mix each individual sound coming from the drum brain.
It may be time for some churches to agree that giant drum cages may disrupt the worship environment more than electronic drums do.
That said, I don’t want to discourage you from making the jump to an e-kit based on this. Even with limited outputs and less-than-ideal playing surfaces, if you’re careful, a budget e-kit can still solve more problems than it creates.
Let’s talk about how they sound.
I worked with a pretty large church with a very generous worship and AV budget for a long time. We featured a choir about once a month and wanted to move away from the full enclosure, at least on the weekends when we featured the choir. For obvious reasons, we still had to control the drum volume, so they invested in a high-quality e-kit.
Aside from me, our main audio team consisted of two other former drummers. If anyone was going to make sure this concept worked, it was us.
We spent many hours choosing the right sound for each component of the drum kit. A huge part of that was not simply sitting there listening on headphones while making adjustments on the brain. One guy was on stage playing and adjusting the brain, the other was at FOH, and the other was in the broadcast studio. It was a team effort, and the long hours paid off.
We realized pretty quickly that decisions had to be made. Do we use the reverb in the brain, or do we go dry like a real kit and use reverbs at the desks? Do we mix the overheads into a stereo pair, or use a channel for each cymbal? Those, and many other questions, had to be answered.
A big takeaway was that we had to work with the understanding that even if a snare, or any other drum or cymbal, in the brain was labeled something like “Thick Snare,” with the description “6 1/2 x 14 birch snare with Remo Pinstripe head,” that label was only a starting point. What was coming through the systems at FOH and in broadcast could sound very different from what we were hearing through headphones directly from the brain. And in all honesty, who really knows what a “6 1/2 x 14 birch snare with Remo Pinstripe head” is supposed to sound like in the real world anyway?
We experimented over a period of months to figure out what worked well and what didn’t. We even experimented with e-kits from two major manufacturers. Once we got everything pretty well dialed in on the brain and the desks, it sounded great.
Our peers who watched and heard the stream often didn’t even notice it was an e-kit.
After many variations of setups, our little group of audio nerds and drummer snobs came to the same conclusion: in the context of worship, the results were excellent. Sure, if you stop everything, go through each channel, and solo it, as an educated listener you could tell it wasn’t absolutely perfect. But when the band played, even if I were blindfolded, I’d be hard pressed to say it wasn’t a darn good mix.
What’s interesting about our extended e-kit experiment is that it aligns with my prior e-kit experience across the board. Even without months of trial and error, just like every other instrument, if you work on the source and the desks together, the results will be better.
The painful truth about drummers and engineers no one talks about, but an e-kit can help.
One of the biggest challenges in smaller churches is that neither the drummer nor the engineer may be operating at a high level yet, and that is not an insult, it’s just reality.
Inexperienced drummers are notoriously inconsistent with dynamics, playing too soft in one section and then way too hard in the next, while a less experienced engineer is often barely hanging on as it is. That combination can make it almost impossible to get a solid mix.
One of the underrated advantages of an e-kit is that you can limit the dynamic response of the kit itself, using the sensitivity settings to standardize the levels so nothing will be too soft or too loud. You cannot do that with a real kit, and there is only so much the person at the desk can do to compensate. This is a big reason why sometimes, you can spend a lot of money on great gear and still wonder why your worship mix is lacking.
There will be compromise, but it may not be as costly as you think.
Everything in audio is a compromise to some degree. Are e-kits perfect? No. Is a real drum kit perfect? Also no. Is your drummer perfect? Your engineer? No and no. There’s the quality of each component to consider: fresh heads, proper tuning, great microphones and their placement, a consistent drummer who plays reliably on every stroke, and a competent engineer who knows how to get the best out of those sources in a very limited timeframe.
If you take into consideration the cost of a great-quality drum kit, quality cymbals, the microphones, and a full enclosure, I’m not saying a high-quality e-kit will always be less expensive than a real kit. But when you add up all the things that make a great acoustic kit sound great, the delta between the two may not be that much.
And for many churches, the bigger issue is not just the gear, but the skill gap among the people using it. An e-kit can help close that gap by taking some of the volatility out of the drummer’s hands and giving the engineer a more consistent source to work with.
So, there I said it.
An e-kit won’t solve all your problems. But maybe we should stop looking down our noses at the churches where they have solved quite a few. They’re not the right solution for every environment. But neither is pretending every church has the drummer, the engineer, the stage, the budget, and the acoustics to make a real kit work well every week.
In the right setting, an e-kit can help the drummer, the engineer, and the worship team get to a cleaner, more consistent mix. Like any voice or instrument, when soloed and stripped of context from the rest of the music, the components of an e-kit will probably sound somewhat unnatural.
But if you’re careful and work from the source with the destination in mind, an e-kit can blend in, complement, and in some cases elevate the entire experience. When the individual components of the worship team disappear into a cohesive whole, how we get there is way less important than where we end up.
