Question about how an electronic drum works.

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I tried to read on how they work, but the explanations are very technical and complicated.

So if I have this right basically, when you hit the drum with a stick, it activates a recording to play and you are playing a pre-recorded sound, is that right? Or do I have it wrong?

That is essentially correct. "Hit Drum, Make Sound" is all the drummer really needs to know.

Anything beyond that quickly becomes technical.

Oh okay thanks. It just makes me wonder how good the pre-recordings are, cause in the past, if I used prerecorded sounds to make music, sometimes they are not that good. So now that I know that, I will have to research more and check.

But it's probably good to know the technical to though, isn't it? I know a guitar player, who knows the music of the instruments and the tuning and everything, and can play, but he didn't know how electric induction worked. He restrung his electric guitar with nylon strings cause he liked the sound of nylon better, only to find out that a pickup cannot pick up a sound produced by nylon.

So I always thought it was good to know how they work for things like that, unless that's overthinking it

There are two basic methods of sound generation: Playback of pre-recorded sounds and synthesis. The former produces a more realistic result, while the latter allows for greater flexibility in sound production.

With the former, a snare sounds like a snare, a top-hat like a top-hat, and a kick-bass like a kick-bass.

With the latter, you can adjust the parameters to make the snare sound like a gunshot, the top-hat sound like rain, and the kick-bass sound like a thunderclap.

It's all good.

Yeah that's what I thought. That makes sense. Why do some people choose synthesis over prerecorded sounds. Because it saves money maybe?

As I said, synthesis allows for greater flexibility in sounds.

Oh okay thanks, but in the video, he doesn't seem to explain whether the sounds are prerecorded and just being played back or if the instruments use induction to create the sound.

An electric guitar of course for example, uses induction to create the sound. It doesn't play back sounds that are already recorded. So do electric drums use induction like an electric guitar, or are each drum in the set, nothing more than a play button, and you hit it, it activates play, to play a recording of a sound?

Oh okay thanks, that helps a lot, that's very interesting. One thing I noticed in the video, when he plays the drums, the snare sounds like a real snare, the symbol sounds like a real cymbal... but the tom toms do not sound like real tom toms and they sound obviously synthesized. So maybe his tom tom samples are not near as good as the snare and cymbal on comparison?

But why do they call it an electric drum set then? Electric, at least to me, implies that uses induction to create the sound. Wouldn't a more proper term be a synthesizer drum set, like a synthesizer guitar, or a synthesizer saxophone?

Oh okay, that's a good point, but the term electric drum set, just seems to me that it implies that the sounds are created through induction.

What about the drum sound at 0:41 into this clip? Would this be a synthesized tom tom sound and not playing an actual recorded sample of one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbJE_L80QRI