Pearl Elimin8R pedals | Eliminator feel, $139

There is a pedal that came with your first drum kit. It has a single chain, a flat bit of metal for a heel plate, and a beater angle you have never once adjusted because you did not know you could.

Pearl has just built the pedal that replaces it.

The Elimin8R landed on 13 August, and it takes eight bits of the Eliminator — the pedal a very large number of working drummers have been standing on for twenty years — and puts them in a frame that costs $139.99.

What is actually in it?

Quite a lot more than the price suggests.

The headline is the Removable Cam System. You get two cams in the box: the Progressive Cam, which speeds up through the stroke and hits you with a sudden burst of acceleration at the end, and the Linear Action Cam, which gives you the same amount of pedal for the same amount of foot, all the way down.

Swapping them takes a minute and completely changes the pedal’s personality. That is the trick the Eliminator built its reputation on, and it is the thing you cannot get on almost anything else at this money.

Underneath that:

• A three-position PowerShifter that slides the footboard’s leverage between light, normal and strong.
• A sprocketless double chain — smoother than a single chain, and no sprocket teeth to develop a notch.
• A full-support base plate, so the whole thing stops walking across the floor the moment you play hard.
• Click-Lock spring tension, a side-access hoop clamp, and Uni-Lock beater angle adjustment.
• Control Core DuoBeaters — two-sided beaters, so you get two attacks without buying anything extra.

The single is the P-1000CX. The double is the P-1002CX at $349.99. UK and European pricing had not been announced when we wrote this.

So who is this for?

This is the honest bit, and it is the reason we wanted to write about it at all.

If you are still on the pedal your kit came with, this is your upgrade. Not a DW 9000. Not an Axis. This. The jump from a stock pedal to a base-plated, swappable-cam pedal is the single biggest feel improvement most drummers ever make, and every jump after it is smaller and more expensive.

If you already own an Eliminator, sit still. You have more cams, a better frame and a pedal you have already dialled in. There is nothing here for you.

If you have been putting off going double, look at the P-1002CX. $349.99 for a double pedal with a base plate and interchangeable cams is the actual story here. Doubles are where budget hardware usually falls apart — the slave side feels like a different instrument to the primary side, and you spend a year blaming your left foot for something the pedal is doing. A shared frame design at this price is a genuinely useful thing to exist.

What we would want to check

We have not had our feet on one yet, so treat everything above as what Pearl says rather than what we have felt.

Two things we would test first. Does the slave side of the double really match the primary — that is where value doubles live or die. And how much play develops in the cam mount after a few months, because a removable cam is, by definition, a joint that was not there before.

Where can I buy one?

The right shop depends on where you are: Guitar Center in the Americas, Gear4music in the UK, or Thomann for Europe and the rest of the world.

Final thoughts

Pedals are the part of the kit where the gap between cheap and good is felt most immediately and understood least well. You can play a cheap cymbal and know exactly what is wrong with it. You play a cheap pedal and just quietly assume you are not very fast.

You usually are. It is normally the pedal.

If that sounds like you, the Elimin8R is aimed squarely at your feet — and the double is the one we would be looking at. Before you spend, it is worth reading our direct drive bass drum pedals guide to understand what chain drive is and is not doing for you, and our DW 9000 feature for a look at what the money buys further up the range.

Then go and put the work in. Our heel toe kick drum technique lesson is where the actual speed comes from, and the Axis pedals guide shows where this road eventually ends.