Hands-on Review: Simmons Titan 50 B-EX

Drum Pads & Cymbal Pads

The pads on this kit are pretty basic but they get the job done for the cheap price point. The additional tom and cymbal pad included in the box is nice, especially if you had been planning on buying a Titan 50 and the expansion pack. Now you can get them both all in one package.

Snare Pad

The snare pad is a 10 inch dual zone pad with a mesh head. The mesh head is 2-ply which is pretty standard for kits of this caliber. I really like how this snare pad feels considering how cheap the kit is. The snare pad is the highlight of the pads, in my opinion.

Tension on the drum head can be adjusted with the tension rods. The rim can generate sounds and has rim shot detection to more naturally represent rim shots while playing. The rim of the drum heads also sits at about the right height from the head surface and doesn’t feel unnaturally high or restrictive.

The snare pad has a single sensor located near the close edge of the rim. There is a little bit of sensitivity roll off towards the back side of the pad, but not enough to cause issues when playing. The center of the pad responds well.

Tom Pads

The tom pads are all 8 inch mesh pads, once again with a 2-ply mesh head. Head tension can also be adjusted on the tom pads. These pads are only single zone and won’t generate sounds on the rim, just the head. The 8 inch size makes them a decent hit target and they don’t feel overly small for a budget kit, which is great. This version of the kit, the B-EX, includes 4 tom pads and completely fills out the mounting space on the rack.

The tom pads have the same sensor setup as the snare pad – a single sensor located at the near edge of the pad. Sensitivity roll off near the back edge of the head feels minimal if you notice it at all, probably due to the smaller size of the pads.

The Cymbal Pads

The cymbal pads on this kit are pretty basic and aren’t anything overly special. They get the job done and are decent for a budget kit. But, they are the most noticeably lackluster pieces of hardware on this kit.

All of the pads are the same, except the two crash cymbals have a choke. There’s no multi-zone pads used for any of the the cymbals.

The hi-hat cymbal is able to do open and closed sounds with a half-open sound in between, which is good but still lacking in subtlety in the range of sounds generated.

The cymbals are ok response-wise and when played they can get some decent dynamics out of the sound module. However, don’t expect anything too magical coming from the cymbals here.

My main complaint about these cymbal pads is the difference in response from the bow to the edge. You need to play them on the bow area of the rubber to get good response. If you play the edge, the response and sensitivity is weak. It’s like they weren’t even designed to have good edge response.

Considering this is a fairly cheap budget kit, and the fact that they are all just single zone cymbals, it’s hard to complain about. But if you like to practice techniques that require alternating between playing the bow and edge of your cymbal you’ll find the lack of edge response to be annoying.

Whenever you see a Titan 50 kit set up, the cymbal pads are always tilted down towards the drummer – and that’s why. It’s because the cymbals respond best to being played on the bow area.

The Bass Drum Pad

The bass drum pad on this kit is fairly small but it’s wide enough to support a double bass pedal in most cases. The pad has a good feel during play. It has just a little bit of soft cushioning on the surface, with a harder surface underneath. The softer top layer helps to keep the noise down a little bit, but it’s not completely silent.

The center of the bass drum pad sits at about 13-3/4 inches off the ground, and with the way it’s designed you don’t have a lot of vertical flexibility in terms of how high or low you can set your beaters on your pedal.

One small thing that stood out to me is that Simmons includes a pad protector sticker that you can place where the beater strikes the pad, which helps protect the surface. That’s something I haven’t found packaged with any other kits I’ve bought.

The Bass Drum Pedal

This kit comes packaged with a single bass drum pedal in the box. It’s a pretty basic, single chain pedal and it feels kind of cheap, but it works fine. The spring tension and beater height can be adjusted. It’s nice that the pedal is included since beginner drummers who might be buying this kit likely don’t already have a pedal.

I’ve been playing on the included kick pedal when using this kit and it’s not that bad, but one thing that kind of bugs me about it is the high angle that the foot board sits at. That’s my only real complaint about it.

Double Kick Bass

The kick pad on this drum kit is easily wide enough to fit a double bass pedal. The response of the pad is good enough to handle double bass, so this can be a good budget kit for beginner metal drummers working on double kick technique. Depending on the type of pedal you use it may or may not clamp easily onto the base, the reason being that the part that pedals clamp onto isn’t wide enough for some pedals to center up the beaters properly on the kick pad head.

I found that it was harder to center up my Axis longboard pedal since it has some risers on each side of the clamp, and the width of the base wasn’t wide enough to sit on top of the risers while also centering the beaters. It was easier to clamp the Axis onto the kick pedal base when I put a strip of metal underneath the part where pedals clip onto the base to to extend it’s effective width.

My Iron Cobra pedal worked better, but also seemed like it would have clamped on better if the clamp was centered with the beaters. So if you’re having trouble centering up your double kick pedal with the pad, a quick trip to the hardware store might be needed to make it work.

The Hi-Hat Pedal

I found this to be a pretty typical budget hi-hat pedal. It has a little bit of a spongy feel to it, but it plays just fine for a kit at this price level. It works well and responds well to your foot movement. Doing hi-hat foot taps works well, but it doesn’t have the ability to do foot splashes.

Feel & Playability

This kit plays fine but it does feel like a budget kit at the end of the day. The highlights when playing are the mesh drum pads and the kick pad.

The snare pad feels great during play and is my favorite pad on the kit. It sounds fairly expressive in conjunction with the sound module and you can do ghost notes, rolls and other techniques without sounding unnatural. The ability to do rim shots helps it feel more like an acoustic drum when you get into your grooves.

The tom pads feel as good as the snare but are lacking that second zone on the rim. Overall they feel good to play and compliment the snare pad nicely.

The kick pad also feels pretty good for a budget kit. It’s got a harder, practice pad type of feel to it but the rebound is good and it responds to faster styles of play.

The cymbal pads feel the most unnatural to play out of all pads on the kit, which is pretty normal for cheaper kits at this price level. The single zone on all the cymbal pads really takes away from sound variation and nuance. The choke is also a little finicky and it feels like you have to grab a very specific spot on the pad to activate the choke.

Also, like I mentioned earlier, the cymbal pads respond best to being hit on top of the pad on the bow area. After you adjust to their lack of sensitivity on the edges they play just fine. You’ll likely end up tilting the cymbal pads down toward yourself to make it easier to strike the top of the pad rather than the edges.

The Rack

The rack that comes with this kit is pretty nice and it actually comes pre-assembled in the box. All you need to do is take out the rack, unfold it, and start mounting the pads, which makes setup quicker than other comparable kits. This is great!

While the rack that comes with the Titan 50 and the Titan 50 B-EX is the same, the B-EX version has a slick black paint finish rather than the gray color of the original Titan 50. Visually speaking, I prefer the black finish but that’s just my opinion.

The rack itself is made with round supports on the vertical parts and rectangular supports on the cross-bars. The rack posts and bars are made from metal and the joints and connectors are plastic. The rectangular supports are nice since they can help keep the drum pad mounts from rotating unexpectedly like they can on some racks with round bars. It just helps keep things in place a little better.

These don’t feel like the most durable rack brackets and clamps out there, so I was a little more careful when tightening them all down. That being said, I’ve owned two Titan 50 kits now and have never had any of the plastic clamps break.

Sturdiness

The kit overall, when everything is assembled, is surprisingly sturdy. There isn’t much for wobble other than the movement you’d expect from normal playing. The pads stay in place and generally everything holds well when the rack and all the clamps are tightened down properly.

The rack itself, while being fairly lightweight, is also quite sturdy. It stands up straight and nothing leans or sags when all the pads are mounted.

The Simmons Titan 50 Drum Module

The B-EX version of the kit includes the same version of the drum module as the original Titan 50. The Titan 50 drum module is pretty straightforward and doesn’t go very deep. However, it’s plenty serviceable for a budget kit like this. It has enough built in sounds and features to get you playing along with your favorite types of music with little effort.

Interface

The interface on this module is designed to be easy for beginner drummers to use. The clearly marked buttons do what you’d expect for the most part and many will find this module usable without even having to look at the manual.

Here’s what you’ll find on the top panel:

• Rec – Enter Record Mode to record a MIDI performance
• Play – Start playback of a song, also works as stop button
• Setup – Enters global settings like trigger sensitivity and MIDI settings
• Save – Press both the Mix/Mute and Play Buttons at the same to time to save kit edits
• LED Display – shows which kit you are playing, tempo and level
• Drum Display – Lights up drums to identify which drums have been hit
• Bluetooth – Indicates if Bluetooth is connected

Inputs & Outputs

Inputs and outputs are fairly well organized on this module. A 25-pin snake is used to connect the bulk of the pads to the module, and the connector plugs in on the bottom of the module. On the back you get most of the rest of the connections.

On The Rear:

• MIDI Output
• USB Connection
• 9v Power Adapter Input

On The Left Side:

• Headphone Output – 1/8″ stereo jack

Scope & Quality of Sounds

The Titan 50 drum module offers a nice set of sounds that have been produced specifically for this module. Simmons used the London Bridge studio in Seattle and brought in Don Gunn to engineer the drum recordings and sounds. Don has experience working with popular music acts such as Soundgarden and Peter Frampton.

The result is a pretty nice set of tightly focused drum kits that revolve around common popular music styles. For example, there are drum kits that mimic Metallica’s Black Album drum sound, the 70’s drum sound, country and modern pop drums. Most drummers will likely find a kit that they really like within this lineup, depending on the styles they play.

There are 187 drum voices overall and 25 preset drum kits. There are also 10 user kit slots for custom drum kits.

Bluetooth

This module has Bluetooth built-in, and it can be used for audio and MIDI operations. You can only use either the audio or MIDI feature alone, not both at the same time.

It can be used to input audio into the sound module from an external device like a smartphone. While doing this, you can play along with audio from your Bluetooth devices.

The module can’t use Bluetooth for wireless headphones, due to limitations with latency and delay, so keep that in mind. You can only use wired headphones with this module.

Selecting Kits

This is pretty easy to do on this module. Simple press the kit button and choose a kit. The digital screen will show which kit you have selected.

Adjusting & Editing Kits

Kits can be edited and saved as a new custom kit with one of the 10 custom kit slots.

There are some more advanced kit editing features available on this module, which are flexible enough to tweak the sound of your kits to your liking.

For editing drum sounds – you can change the drum sound assigned to each pad, change the pitch and change the decay time.

Editing kits has a few more options. You can change the level and panning of any of the sounds around the kit. There is a Reverb feature that allows you to send each sound to the reverb send individually, which helps dial in very specific reverb usage around the kit. There is a compression feature allows you to apply compression to the entire kit sound. There is also a high/low EQ feature which affects the overall kit sound.

Song Mode

This mode allows you to play along with audio files or MIDI tracks. You can record your performances along with the songs and play them back, which is helpful for practicing and analysis.

Practice Mode

Practice mode on this module is an extension of the Song mode. Practice mode allows you to play along with the songs and the module will score your accuracy along several difficulty levels.

You can change between a few different practice mode options. You can play along with the song with a click or no click. You can play along with the song with intermittent clicks, which help you get used to playing with no click. You can also play along with the song and click track intermittently cutting out, so that you can get used to keeping time when the music drops out.

Setup Mode

Setup mode is basically the utility settings mode on this module. This is where you’ll adjust things like pad sensitivity and trigger settings. For as basic as this module is, it has a pretty good set of configuration options. The options you can adjust include:

• Local MIDI – let’s you choose if the MIDI control is coming from the module or a DAW
• Click Record – metronome settings for recording
• Bluetooth – is always on but can be turned off
• Auto Power Off – turns off the kit automatically when it’s sitting idle for while
• Tom Type – if you upgrade to dual zone tom pads you can change the setting here to make the drum module work with the pads
• Ratio – adjusts the sound ratio of dual zone pads

Metronome

The metronome settings are pretty standard, and there isn’t really anything flashy going on here. You can change volume, tempo and time signature.

What’s Not?

Here’s what’s not included with this kit or things you might want to pick up:

• Drum throne
• More drum sticks
• Headphones
• A better bass drum pedal
• Heavy rug

Setup & Assembly

This drum kits is pretty easy to setup compared to some other. This is mostly because the rack comes pre-assembled in the box and you simply need to take the rack out and unfold it to get started. With the rack assembly out of the way, which can sometimes be the most tedious thing with a new electronic drum kit, all you need to do is start attaching the pads and cabling everything up. It’s possible to have this up and running in less than a half hour.

Warranty

Simmons offers a 2 year warranty to cover defects in workmanship and material. This is one year longer than some other brands offer, which is nice.

The Verdict

The Simmons Titan 50 B-EX electronic drum kit is a pretty nice beginners or budget kit even if it’s lacking in features on the pads.

The extra pads that come in the box are nice to have, no need to pick up an expansion pack. The mesh pads and dual zone snare help give it a good feel during play. The snare pad really stands out as fun to play with it’s rim shots. Drummers who want more multi-zone pads or better cymbals might be disappointed.

The sound module sounds good and has some good kit configuration and effects option, but is limited in sound design capabilities. If you’re going to be editing kits and effects settings, using the Simmons Drums 2 app is more enjoyable than the module interface.

Overall, the Titan 50 B-EX is a good option for drummers who are seeking a cheap, budget friendly kit, but it might not be a good long term option as your skills grow and you demand more from your hardware.