Mesh drum heads are starting to be used more often on the kick drum pads for electronic drum kits. If your kit has a mesh head on the kick pad you might want to avoid using felt beaters. The reason is that mesh drum heads can chew up and felt beaters and wear them down quickly.
In addition to wearing down the felt beater quickly, the dust from the felt beater can start to accumulate inside of the kick pad tower, and it could make a mess of things or possibly even negatively affect sensors or other electronics inside of the pad.
Here’s a good example of what I mean. I used a felt beater on the NUX DM-8 kick tower for just a couple days and even with that small amount of usage I ended up with a lot of white felt dust inside of the pad.
In this photo, I had already cleaned up the majority of the dust, but there’s still a white mark on the foam that sits directly underneath the mesh head. Before I cleaned it up, it looked like it was full of chalk dust and it was all falling down on the sensor ring.
In order to avoid making a mess of the inside of your kick drum pad, you can simply avoid using felt beaters on the raw mesh head. Using a hard beater avoids the issue entirely. If you like the feel of felt beaters and prefer to use one, use one of those adhesive beater patches on the mesh head to keep the felt from striking the raw mesh surface.
