Feeling Stressed? Bang on some drums! It is great to get tension out and lots of fun! The Studio Session (iED05) Drums from ION audio allow you to rock out like a pro. And best of all they are really a bargain! I love finding bargains, and these take the cake. I bought these for a mere $139, with the next step up being a $500 product.

I am by no means an expert drummer, and thus not qualified to judge the product for expert drummers and serious musicians, but for everyone else these drums are perfect. I actually purchased these drums to record some drum loops for my amateur music hobby, but so far I have had an absolute blast just banging on ‘em. If you are the type of person that loves to rock out in the car, sing along and bang on your steering wheel or your knees to a song I am certain you will find banging on a real set of drums not only a blast, but also a very therapeutic tension tamer.

These drums are so inexpensive I think they are a great value even for those with limited musical interest. The included software includes an MP3 player so you can select a song out of your mp3 collection, turn up the volume and rock out! The software allows you to adjust the volume of the drums in relation to the volume of the music, so if you just want to pound on the drums for fun you can turn the drum volume down a little, and any mediocrity in your drumming abilities will blend into the background, much like singing along to the car radio. On the other hand if you are trying to improve your drumming and are very concerned about hearing your specific drum strokes over the music just turn up the drums and it is easy to differentiate your drumming from the drums in the song.

One of the more obvious ideas that comes to mind when one sees the appearance and price of these drums is how great these may be for your child or teenager. There are some great aspects of these drums for kids, but also some cautions.

Perhaps the best thing that parents will like about these is that they are pretty quiet. There is still a sound produced from striking a the rubber pads with a drumstick, but it is nowhere near the volume of a real drum, parents would probably prefer these to be played behind a closed door, and if so you would likely hear nothing or almost nothing outside the room. In my opinion they are much more practical than real drums as well; if you listen to a few songs you will hear a LOT of different types of drums, all of which can be easily matched by a digital drum-set.

A standard drum set is far to limited in the range of sounds making it difficult to emulate the drums on even a small variety of music. Another positive are the advanced features of the drum-set.

As I mentioned I am not an expert drummer, but I am convinced that if someone purchased this drum-set to learn with it would last them quite a while. The MIDI capabilities allow integration into any advanced music software and access to an endless supply of drum and percussion sounds. Another advanced feature that surprised me is the touch sensitivity, which is accurate and works very well. For the price I was very surprised that this set even had this feature.

Now for the negatives: The web site states that "Studio Session comes with play-along sound software with a sweet video game that makes learning to play the drums easy and fun, " a quite misleading statement. The drums are really great and are a really great bargain, but the video game/learning software leaves a lot to be desired. Buy these if you want a set of drums to bang on, to learn with or for a set of good drums with full midi support for lower budget musicians. Don’t buy them if you want a video game or learning software!

The software is similar in concept to the "Rock Band", except that it doesn’t, well, rock. This could be a deal breaker for some, but these drums are such a bargain already, you can’t really expect much more. The main flaw of the “video game software” is that it is geared exclusively for advanced players. There are only a few songs, they all have very difficult drum parts, they all play at full speed and I have not found any way to adjust the tempo.

The only other big draw-back I could find is that this particular set is USB driven and requires a computer to do anything. This isn’t so much a negative as requirement to be aware of.

The bottom line is that this product is such a bargain that it is really in a class by itself. Rock on!