EFNOTE 7 Review: Can You Stop Thinking About the Fact That You’re Playing Electronic Drums?

For Tris Imboden, the appeal of EFNOTE was never simply about better electronic drums. It was about getting back to the experience of sitting behind a kit and making music.

There comes a point with almost every piece of music technology where the specifications stop mattering and the experience takes over. A guitarist stops thinking about the circuitry inside the amplifier, a keyboard player stops thinking about the sample engine underneath the piano sound, and a drummer sits behind a kit, counts off the song and, ideally, everything between the sticks and the music simply disappears.

Electronic drums have been chasing that moment for decades.

The technology has improved dramatically. Mesh heads have become more responsive, triggering has become more sophisticated, sound libraries have grown enormously, and manufacturers can now give players control over nearly every imaginable part of a drum sound, from tuning and shell characteristics to ambience, processing and room simulation. There is no question that electronic drums are capable of doing more than they ever have before.

But there is another question that may be more important, particularly for a drummer who has spent a lifetime behind acoustic drums.

Can you stop thinking about the fact that you are playing electronic drums?

That question kept coming back to me while looking at the EFNOTE 7, and it became even more relevant after talking with Tris Imboden about his own experience with electronic drums.

Imboden hardly needs an introduction to anyone who has followed great drummers over the past several decades. His career includes nearly three decades with Chicago, along with extensive work with Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Neil Diamond, Richard Marx and a long list of artists who required much more than someone who could simply keep time. His playing has always been rooted in feel, dynamics, musicality and understanding what the song actually needs.

He also has plenty of history with electronic percussion.

That matters because Tris did not arrive at EFNOTE as someone seeing a sophisticated electronic drum set for the first time. He had already lived through several eras of the technology, including Simmons and later Roland V-Drums. He understood what electronic drums could do, appreciated the technology and had owned a set of V-Drums himself.

His frustration was not that the Roland system was incapable. In many ways, the opposite was true.

It could do an enormous amount, but that was part of the problem. Tris felt there was simply too much to deal with before he could get to the place he actually wanted to be, which was sitting behind a drum set and making music.

When More Becomes Too Much

That distinction gets to something the electronic drum industry does not talk about enough.

For years, advancement has often been measured by how much more a system can give the drummer. More sounds, more parameters, more routing possibilities, more modeling, more trigger adjustments and more ways to completely reshape the instrument have all become selling points.

For certain players, producers and studio environments, those capabilities are incredibly valuable. There are people who genuinely enjoy going several layers deep into a module and creating a drum kit from the ground up, and for them that level of control can be a major advantage.

Tris was looking for something different.

In our conversation, what came through clearly was that he wanted the electronic experience to behave more like his relationship with an acoustic kit. An acoustic drum set obviously requires setup. You position the drums, adjust the hardware, tune the heads and make changes until everything feels right. You may retune it periodically, change heads or make adjustments depending on the room, the gig or what you are recording.

But once the instrument is ready, you play it.

You are not continually interacting with the technology of the drum set. You are interacting with the music.

With his V-Drums, Tris felt that getting from turning the kit on to reaching that musical place could become cumbersome. There were simply too many things between sitting down and playing, and for someone whose instinct is to respond to the song, every additional decision has the potential to pull attention away from what actually matters.

That was one of the things he responded to when he discovered EFNOTE.

It felt simpler, not simplistic, and there is an important difference between the two.

The EFNOTE 7 has plenty of technology underneath it, but much of that technology seems to have been designed around the idea that the drummer should not have to spend much time thinking about it.

In a market where manufacturers often compete by adding features, EFNOTE has created something compelling by asking a different question: How much of the technology can disappear once the drummer starts playing?

The First Solution Is Physical

You begin to understand that philosophy before the EFNOTE 7 is even turned on.

A lot of electronic kits require an acoustic drummer to make an immediate physical adjustment. The pads are smaller, the spacing is different and the relationship between the components can feel condensed compared with the instrument the drummer has played for years.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach. Smaller pads make electronic drums easier to fit into apartments, rehearsal spaces and home studios, and there are countless drummers who adapt to them without a problem.

The important word, however, is adapt.

EFNOTE seems determined to reduce the amount of adapting the drummer has to do.

The EFNOTE 7 uses a 20-inch kick, 14-inch snare, 11-inch rack tom and 15-inch floor tom, all presented in acoustic-style shells with mesh heads. Once the kit is positioned, the geography feels familiar. The snare occupies the space a snare normally occupies, the bass drum feels substantial beneath the foot and the floor tom sits where years of muscle memory expect a floor tom to be.

That may sound like a small distinction until you consider how much of drumming happens without conscious thought.

An experienced drummer does not calculate the distance between the snare and floor tom before playing a fill. The body already knows. The same goes for moving from the hi-hat to the ride or coming back to the snare after reaching for a crash. Those movements have been repeated thousands upon thousands of times until they become instinctive.

If an electronic kit changes that physical landscape too dramatically, some portion of the drummer's attention has to compensate for it.

The EFNOTE 7 allows the drummer to bring more of that existing physical vocabulary with them.

There is a visual benefit as well. Onstage, this does not look like a practice station surrounded by a collection of pads. The shells and full-sized bass drum give the EFNOTE 7 the presence of an acoustic drum set, which becomes particularly valuable in theaters, churches, production environments and live venues where visual presentation matters almost as much as controlling volume.

The Cymbal Problem

If electronic drums have one place where the illusion can break quickly, it is usually the cymbals.

Drum triggering has become remarkably sophisticated, but cymbals are complicated instruments. They move in ways a drum head does not. They swing, flex, wobble and respond differently depending on whether the drummer strikes the edge, bow or bell. A hi-hat is more complicated still because the sound and response are constantly being shaped by the relationship between the drummer's hand and foot.

An electronic cymbal can sound wonderful, but if the drummer has to remember where the trigger zone is or modify the way the stick lands on the cymbal, the brain gets another reminder that this is not quite the instrument it is pretending to be.

This is one of the areas where EFNOTE has built a particularly strong reputation.

The EFNOTE 7 includes a 16-inch crash and a substantial 20-inch ride with 360-degree sensing. That means the drummer is not spending the night worrying about whether the cymbal has rotated and moved the optimal playing area away from the stick. The ride also provides distinct bow, edge and cup response, while its size gives it movement that feels much closer to the familiar motion of an acoustic cymbal.

Then there is the hi-hat.

EFNOTE's 14-inch two-piece optical hi-hat may be one of the most important parts of the entire system because the hi-hat is where electronic drums can either feel wonderfully responsive or remind you immediately that there is a controller interpreting what your foot is doing.

EFNOTE uses optical sensing to track the movement of the two cymbals and translate the transition between closed, partially open and open positions. The underlying engineering is sophisticated, but the objective is very simple: the drummer should not have to change the way the hi-hat is played in order to accommodate the electronics.

This was one of the areas that impressed Tris most, and he has been particularly outspoken about EFNOTE's cymbals. That enthusiasm makes sense when placed inside the larger story because it is not merely that the cymbals sound good. It is that they remove another layer of thought from the playing experience.

You reach for the ride and play it, work the hi-hat with your foot the way you normally would, and stop managing an electronic cymbal so you can simply play it, which is a significant difference.

That may be one of the best examples of EFNOTE's overall approach. The technology is not there to announce itself. It is there to let the drummer behave naturally.

A Module That Knows Its Place

The same philosophy carries into the EFD-7 module.

Electronic drum modules have evolved into incredibly powerful pieces of equipment, and there are systems available today that allow a drummer to go remarkably deep into sound design. Depending on the platform, you can alter shell characteristics, head types, microphone positions, rooms, compression, effects and nearly every other imaginable aspect of the finished drum sound.

For someone building custom sounds or producing records, that depth can be invaluable.

It can also become the very thing Tris was trying to get away from.

The EFD-7 offers plenty of control where it counts. You can tune instruments, adjust muffling, change volume and pan, work with EQ and ambience and create customized setups. There is Bluetooth for bringing music into the system, MIDI connectivity, USB and multichannel digital audio for recording into a computer.

The technology is there, but EFNOTE does not seem particularly interested in making the module the reason you buy the kit.

The sounds lean toward natural acoustic drum character rather than presenting the player with an overwhelming library whose primary selling point is the number printed on the box. That will not appeal to everybody. Some electronic drummers want thousands of sounds and enjoy scrolling through an enormous palette of acoustic, electronic, processed and experimental instruments.

There is absolutely a place for that.

EFNOTE's approach feels more like walking into a studio where somebody has already put several really good drum kits in the room. You choose one, make the adjustments you need and start playing.

For the type of drummer who thinks the instrument should facilitate music rather than become another piece of software to operate, that approach is refreshing.

What the EFNOTE 7 Actually Solves

This is where the EFNOTE 7 becomes more interesting than a list of features.

The full-sized shells are not simply there because they look better. They solve the problem of an acoustic drummer having to reorganize years of physical muscle memory.

The larger cymbals are not simply there because they photograph well. Their size, movement and 360-degree response solve some of the physical compromises electronic cymbals traditionally impose on the player.

The optical hi-hat is not impressive merely because optical technology sounds advanced. It exists to make the relationship between the drummer's foot and the hi-hat feel more natural.

Even the relative simplicity of the module can be seen as a solution rather than a limitation.

For Tris, that may have been the most important part.

He did not need electronic drums to give him more things to think about. He needed them to give him fewer.

There is something almost counterintuitive about that in today's technology market. We have become accustomed to measuring value by the number of features a product includes, even when most of those features will rarely be used. More becomes synonymous with better.

Musicians often experience things differently.

Sometimes the best technology is the technology that removes a problem and then disappears.

That idea may ultimately be the EFNOTE 7's strongest argument.

It Is Still an Electronic Drum Set

None of this means the EFNOTE 7 is perfect, nor does it mean it will be the right instrument for every electronic drummer.

Someone who wants an enormous internal sound library, deep modeling capabilities or a system built primarily around elaborate sample manipulation may find other platforms better suited to that workflow. Players who need extensive individual analog outputs for sophisticated touring applications may also want to look further up EFNOTE's own line at the PRO systems or toward competing products designed specifically around that kind of routing.

The EFNOTE 7 is also physically substantial. If the main attraction of electronic drums is the ability to collapse an entire kit into the smallest possible footprint, there are more compact choices.

Those tradeoffs are worth acknowledging because they help define what the EFNOTE 7 actually is.

This is not an electronic drum set attempting to be everything to everybody.

It feels much more focused than that.

It is an electronic drum set for someone who still fundamentally thinks like an acoustic drummer.

That distinction is important because the EFNOTE 7 is not asking the player to fall in love with electronic drumming as a separate discipline. It is trying to preserve enough of the familiar playing experience that the electronics become secondary.

The Tris Imboden Test

That is why Tris Imboden becomes such an interesting person through whom to judge the EFNOTE 7.

He had already experienced sophisticated electronic percussion. He understood its advantages, had used it professionally and owned a set of V-Drums himself. He was not looking for somebody to convince him that electronic drums were legitimate instruments.

What he wanted was a kit that demanded less attention from him as an operator.

He wanted the process to feel more like the relationship he had always had with acoustic drums. Set them up, get them sounding and feeling right, make adjustments when necessary, and then play.

There is something almost old-fashioned about that idea, even though EFNOTE is using decidedly modern technology to accomplish it.

The innovation is not simply in what the kit can do.

The innovation may be in how little the drummer has to think about what it is doing.

That is ultimately what makes the EFNOTE 7 worth paying attention to.

Electronic drums have spent decades becoming more powerful, more realistic and more sophisticated. The EFNOTE 7 benefits from all of that progress, but it points toward another stage in the evolution of the instrument, one in which the technology becomes sophisticated enough that the drummer no longer has to be constantly aware of it.

When the music starts, the specifications should become irrelevant.

You should not be thinking about trigger zones, menu structures or whether your ride cymbal has rotated away from the correct playing area. You should be listening to the bass player, reacting to the singer, shaping the dynamics of the song and deciding whether the next fill actually needs to be played.

That is what drummers do.

Perhaps that is the best way to judge the EFNOTE 7, not by asking how convincingly it can imitate an acoustic drum set, but by asking something much simpler.

Can you stop thinking about the fact that you are playing electronic drums?

For Tris Imboden, the answer came when the electronics finally became simple enough, natural enough and intuitive enough that he could get back to what mattered in the first place.

He could sit down and just play.