We're hoping the snare will come good once we have had chance to play around with it. Even though the tension is not anywhere as high as our usual gigging standard, there is very little of the counter hoop protruding above the head. Improving their sound even more, Performance Percussion PP300 drum kits now come fitted with Remo® drum heads! The Remo® name has been legendary in music circles for over 45 years now, for their range of high performance drum heads, which have famously been used by drummers as far apart as Ringo with The Beatles to Chad Smith with The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Since its introduction a few years ago, the Performance Percussion PP300 5-piece drum kit has been the #1 selling kit in the competitive UK & Eire market of entry level starter kits. This concentration on the tuning abilities of the snare and bass drum is quite right, and it is only the 16" floor tom that is underequipped lugwise in any sizeable way. The pressed hoops are par for the course and seem up to their job. Likewise the generic tuning rods worked without complaint when assembling the kit and held tuning while testing it. Welcome to the Drum department. Here you will find acoustic and digital drum kits , cymbals and percussion instruments both for the beginner to the professional.

Commonly, a complete drum kit contains five pieces: a snare, three toms, and a bass drum. These are known as shells, cymbals then complete the kit, usually, hi-hat, crash, and ride cymbals, but many will add an additional china and splash.The lugs are a commendable detail worth drawing attention to - where you might expect to find clumsy or weighty shell architecture there are instead rather neat low mass lugs that wouldn't look out of place on kits costing a good deal more. The distribution of lugs is not bad either. The toms are all furnished with six pairs (fine for the 12" and 13" toms, not great for the 16" floor tom) while the snare and bass drum contain eight per head (the snare's double-ended lugs means it technically has only eight as opposed to the bass drum's total of 16). The supplied cymbals are unbelievably trashy-sounding. They are not unusable, but raising a young drummer on such sounds would surely instil in him or her a sound palette not unlike that of Terry Bozzio's. If the esteemed Mr B were to hear these cymbals while walking past your house he would probably be at your front door in the blink of a flam offering you cash for them. They're that trashy. Going through the manual we find some amusing Chinese/English translation issues, ie: "Press [DRUM KIT] constantly" which actually means 'Hold down [DRUM KIT] button'. Once you suss these and other anomalies with a little common sense interpretation of your own, using the kit is actually quite intuitive. The snare, somewhat curiously, boasted a clear batter head, and so was more open than a coated batter would have allowed. Again, a little judicious Moongel tamed the savage beast, and the thin steel shell and single-ply heads allowed it to cut through with alacrity. Much of the engineering here (including lugs, tuning bolts etc), is to an acceptable standard. However, the least impressive piece is the snare drum throw-off lever. This has been shaped from pressed steel and feels extremely rough to the touch and quite honestly looks like the subject of a failed metalwork project - simply put, it feels cheap and nasty. Hands On

As we strike up the first of the pre- programmed songs, we can't help being impressed with the song construction. Though they are of the sort you would normally hear in an airport lounge or an elevator, we are sure the choice will prove good introductory material for any beginner.Adjustment does give the pad more sensitivity but there is some cross-talk if taken to its maximum. These Chinese-made Remos can and do sound equally as good as their USA counterparts but we find they have tendency to dent rapidly so they don't hold their tone quite as well, ageing them prematurely. As a one-stop drumming shop, the PP300R does very nicely, thank you very much. With all you need to get started, frankly the only other thing they could cram in would be your own personal teacher. For the PP300R, Performance have chosen Remo heads. This is an area that conventional budget kits often treat as an afterthought and, as the choice of head makes an enormous contribution to the sound of a drum, it´s certainly a good move.

With the exception of the pre-fitted heads of the snare, the others have to be fitted on the rest of the kit. First up it's the toms where the only slightly worrying aspect is that the floor tom has only six lugs per head - eight would have been preferable for a drum of this size. It takes some careful and diligent tuning methods but each tom produces a deep but wide open and acceptable tone.The felt beater of the bass drum pedal rounded the edges off, leaving a pleasing 'dooosshhh' sound before a small towel, placed against the batter head, focused the bass enormously.