It's been a while since I have posted anything in the topic, but my youngest son is really enjoying playing them. He's really taken an interest to them, and is actually playing more quickly than I thought he would.
Most of the time when he gets home from school, the first thing he does is bail to the basement. Which is a good thing. Gives him something to look forward to doing when school is over for the day and to unwind, which is great to have an outlet for all those day to day things that all of us deal with.
And lets' face it, time spent away from the computer and stuff is always a good thing too. I was always hands on. I think young adults should be too. All this sitting in front of a screen is not doing any of them any favors.
In the few months that he's had them, he's been getting his own style. I've tried not to influence it any and just let him come into his own element with them and he has seen that when he just plays naturally, it just feels good and right. He was playing some CCR songs the other night and was actually doing really dang good with them.
Since he has taken a serious interest and liking to them, I told him that I'd upgrade them little by little until he had a really nice set.
So, some of the things he asked for Christmas was drum related, he got a cymbal boom and a used sabian ride cymbal.
He had a small drum set when he was about 4 years old that we had in storage and he robbed the small 8 inch tom off of it and we refinished it and mounted it to the boom stand with a clamp.
So, now it's grown to a 7 piece set, which I think is plenty big enough. I still have to refinish the 13 inch Tom to match the rest of them that came in todays mail, but that's simple enough and he's going to help with that.
The next few months, we plan on replacing the heads a few at a time until they're all changed starting with the snare head because it's dead and sounds like crap.
The only thing that will be left after new heads will be a decent double bass pedal, but that will likely be several months down the road and may be his Birthday present this summer. Maybe a 14 or 15 inch fast crash somewhere down the road. That's really about it. Finding this stuff used on ebay cheap sure doesn't hurt anything either. The 13 inch Tom that came in todays mail was only $20 shipped, so that beats paying out $100 a pop every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
He has decided that once he gets all his heads changed out, that by that time, he might be confident enough to record a couple of cover songs and put them on youtube (unlisted) to show off to some of his buddies. Important thing is, he's enjoying his self and truth is, doing pretty darn good playing them too.