Yamaha FGDP-50 Finger Drum Pad

Exceeded my expectations as a playable instrument. Very easy to use straight out of the box. I was particularly impressed with the response of the pads, you can pretty rapidly drum three or four fingers to create flam and rolls on one pad. Has most of the basic features you would expect in such a product.
The build quality isn't great, a bit plasticky, however the pads themselves are very solid. The screen is pretty basic and takes a little navigation but for the money I can't complain.
Internal speaker is not bad for the size and fine for just jamming with your mates, it is louder than I expected and you can adjust the sound with a few pre-sets. However the FGDP-50 really shines when you use headphones or monitors. Jamming along with tunes on headphones is my new favourite pastime.
The samples themselves are very nice. The acoustic and electronic drums sound great to me and there are loads of crazy EDM and percussion samples.
The battery isn't great so expect to have to plug the USB in for most uses.
All in all a great product which I am thoroughly addicted to.

The finger drums are intuitive to play and setup/modification is easy enough (plus there are plenty of youtube tutorials for this unit).

The design of the drum pads are excellent and this makes playing drums as intuitive as typing on a keyboard, and I've been able to achieve more realistic sounding results far more quickly with this than I have using grid-based trigger pads or manual programming.

This said, some elements of the unit are a little clunky/dated feeling, such as the process for loading your own samples or the necessity of using a USB drive to record, but I see these more as quirks of the device than real detractions from it's usability.

My only real criticism is that when programming a custom kit, the device has no RAM so if you accidentally change patches without saving first (as is quite easy to do) you'll lose everything you've programmed. The only way around this is to remember to save every single time you change a parameter on a custom kit, which makes the process very slow and quite tedious.

What this could really benefit from would be some software to support custom kit design and loading samples. Perhaps this is something that Yamaha could produce in the future and add support through a firmware update.

As a guitarist looking to make decent midi beats this ticks all the boxes. Much quicker and easier than clicking a mouse on a screen. Sounds ok through its built in speaker and amazing via headphones or monitor.

No loop function, which is a bit of a miss but it’s not sold has having one - there’s a repeat function that looks promising mind.

Listening to songs through the aux in and tapping out simple beats with headphones on is very very addictive and great fun. The sounds (to me) could easily be used live. Midi out via mini usb is easy enough.

The menus and screen are a bit old school - but it’s all there on board, self contained.

Battery powered, portable and feels solid - just switch it on and start jamming out.

As stated, early days but loads of sounds and options, well thought out and well executed product.

Great price and delivery from Thomann as ever.