Hi draconis,
Welcome to the finger drumming community.
If you want to stay low-budget for now, and only use the device for finger drumming, I'd still recommend the AKAI MPD218. The pads are great, but people have reported that the quality / sensitivity has deteriorated over the years since it has been launched in 2015. So, if you buy one, check the pads thoroughly and consider giving the device back to the store you bought it from if the pads aren't okay. There are two main things to pay attention to:
1) Is the pad sensitivity okay for you? In other words: Can you play low-velocity hits and high-velocity hits effortlessly and is the dynamic range (between the poles "silent" and "very loud") acceptable and close to identical on all pads? There are ways to measure this with midi monitoring in your DAW or virtual drum module (e.g. in Addictive Drums 2), but you can also FEEL if there are huge differences from pad to pad.
2) Are the pads double-triggering a lot? Only very few and rather expensive devices have pads that don't double-trigger. But even on low-budget devices double-triggering shall be in an acceptable range. Sometimes you can hear double-triggered notes, but you can definitely SEE them, when recording a midi performance into a midi track of your DAW. Most of the time, those double-triggered notes are much less loud than the actually intended note played, almost like a ghost note. Double-triggered notes get particularly annoying when playing with your device set to "fixed velocity", because all notes will then be amplified to the exact same volume.
I've heard a lot of negative comments about the AKAI MPD226 in the last few years, especially about the pads themselves, so I would not recommend buying one, unless you read some recent comments on YouTube which say that AKAI has fixed the problem... because for a long time it seems they haven't.
Best regards,
Andreas
