KAT Percussion KT-TBB Silent Strike Bass Drum Beater Reviews

This is basically a bouncy rubber ball on a stick. I'm using it on the old rubber Roland KD-8 kick pad, and it works a treat. Very, very quiet acoustically, and gives a nice rebound. You will need to adjust the pad's sensitivity because it doesn't hit as hard as felt or plastic, and if you're using a mesh head, get a protective patch as well.

really cool and worth the wait. using on acoustic drum though because hate electronic toys.

Very nice edrum beater... Can't go wrong with these... Makes you wonder why someone else hasn't had this idea already.

Bought this to use with pad-style triggers and it works well and quietly within its limitations, as follows: used with an Alesis pad consisting of a tension-adjustable Mylar head over a foam kick trigger, it tends to bounce, producing double and even triple-triggering. Lowering the tension of the head helps, but you may need to either adopt double strokes as a creative feature or special effect OR adjust your stroke on the pedal, which could be problematic for players like me, who use both rest and free strokes on the kick drum. Maybe moot, since most drum brains don't differentiate-but some drum VSTis can and do. OTOH, what you can probably do with just about any trigger setup is get some very fancy multi-stroke rolls on the kick with two of these and a double pedal, given enough round-robin kick samples and some practice. I have also used the Silent Strike with a Yamaha kick trigger tower, which has a rubber pad that produces even more bounce. Maybe that can be mitigated by building a cover from a second tennis ball and a sock or some other kind of padding or adding a Neoprene, Kevlar or leather patch to your pad, but pricewise, by that point you're as well off with a a different beater. Still, it's worth having in the toolkit, imo, because it can also produce a unique and interesting timbre on acoustic drums, if you swing that way.

The whole reason I found this product is that I"m a bass player and from time to time in my band we could use some extra Cowbell or tambourine. While a blunt object hitting a Cowbell is fine, hitting a kit mount tambourine with a bass drum mallet gives a lot of noise from the mallet hit. I found this little gem and it works wonderfully for this purpose. Little to no impact noise. All you hear is the tambourine. Impressed.

The problem with a standard felt beater on a non-mesh electronic drum is that there is a very present plastic click with each stroke. This is likely due to the foam pad directly behind the head on the Alesis pads I use. I first tried swapping out to a mesh head, and this actually made the click worse. I did get some relief by putting a neoprene pad on the head, but a real solution was needed. The KAT Silent Strike Bass Drum Beater seemed like an inexpensive fix, and this is what I found out; I used a dB meter to measure the plastic/felt beater = 65.5 dBA @ 1m. The Kat measured 61.5 db, a 4db reduction, This is significant. Longevity is yet to be seen, but construction seems pretty good. I'll enjoy the quiet while it lasts!

I wouldn't use this on a mesh bass drum head as a tennis ball is just like a felt beater which is a NO-NO on mesh heads! It's been proven that there's too much friction caused by using felt beaters on mesh heads and eventually tears a hole through the bass drum head. I think this is a great idea for Mylar and rubber bass drum heads though!