Building the Yamaha Billy Cobham Signature Drum Kit Part One

Hello gentle readers and welcome to 2026! It's been a minute since my last blog. In the interim I have finally begun to complete my latest acoustic to electronic drum kit conversion of Yamaha's Billy Cobham Signature Drum Kit! Back in January of 2018, I wrote about "Building the Yamaha Billy Cobham Signature Snare Drum", with an eye to building an entire kit with an identical silver sparkle finish. Now, some 9 years later I've finally gotten around to gathering and assembling the shells, lugs and wraps when a new thought hit me, "Why don't I make the kit entirely electronic, just like those made by Roland, DWe and EFNote?" My earlier experiments with internal drum triggers were met with mixed results; (The ddrum Chrome Elites, Pintech, Roland and even the wireless Versatriggers external triggers were decent, but never were consistent or reliable enough to play live regularly. Then I discovered the folks in Hungary called "Padtech", who made some of the best internal, "drop-in" tray triggers. I absolutely love them, unfortunately, I don't speak Hungarian and communicating with them was a challenge. That said, I was able to find an affordable US manufacturer, Cameron Dolby of Dolby Drums, who outfitted me with every trigger I needed. With a call to Jammin' Sam in Arizona, the wraps arrived and the process of wrapping the drums, re-drilling holes and adding the lugs was off and running. The Yamahas were actually made up of shells from Sound Percussion kits I'd previously converted with Yamaha mounts and custom-made badges. Cobham's unique set-up, or "tonal palette" has always intrigued me. His rack toms were arranged backwards; 14", 12", 13", 10" and 8" to avoid the cliche, chromatic fills. I loved it mainly because like Cobham, I'm also ambidextrous and love having the 14" rack tom next to my ride cymbal for low tom fills.                                                                              

My version of Cobham's kit features two 22" x 16" bass drums; 14" x 5.5" snare, 16" and 14" floor toms and the aforementioned 14", 13", 12", 10" and 8" rack toms. Unlike Cobham, I preferred to keep my rack toms in numerical and chromatic order for the music I play and to this day, I still don't know how Cobham makes that work with the 12" and 13" in their "normal" position! Cobham's "butterfly" drum fills; Rolling on the toms with his arms extended with his left hand striking the 14", 12" and snare and his right hand on the 10", 13" and snare in a continuous, circular motion is something that continues to amaze me!

With the experience of having built a few previous e-drum kits, the addition of the Neutrik 1/4" phono jacks and cable is a huge plug and play plus. The Padtech and Dolby Drums triggers all use the standard 1/4" phono jack inputs, however the Jobeky's use an 1/8" jack input, so an angled adapter is needed. My previous drop-in trigger e-kit conversions include a coverted 6 piece Black Gretsch/Jobeky, 6 piece Yellow Tama/Padtech and recently, a 4 piece Chrome Tama/Dolby Drums all included Neutrik 1/4" shell mount mono or stereo connectors. With the recent donation of my Mapex Billy Cobham 20th Anniversary Custom Model Kit to Music Wings, (a wonderful local music school program), I was down to the Yamaha kit for the next conversion, my largest to date. I started by stripping off the old black Sound Percussion wrap, and as I'd experienced with my earlier conversions, installation of the new wrap, the Neutrik shell jack inputs and the triggers was a breeze. It's worth mentioning that unlike the internal Jobeky and Padtech bass drum triggers, the 22" Dolby Drums version is more akin to the Roland built-in external AD-22, but 100% better looking and easier to use. 



I'll be completing the rest of the kit and hopefully testing it live later this year! Stay tuned...😎 
  



























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