Malletkat clone (marimba, vibraphone, xylophone) controller

[glenn.szymanski]

So, I've seen a few posts on here about people wanting to do this same type of project, but nothing much about anyone's success or failure or pictures.

I would love to just buy a malletkat or xylosynth, but who has $3000?

My plan is to just cut a piece of thick plywood to the same dimensions of the malletkat and make the bars (with piezo mounted on each) out of either wood or plastic and then put rubber or felt underneath each bar and maybe on top. i also thought of maybe mounting each bar at top and bottom with a screw inside a spring, so that it would have some bounce and maybe act as extra cushioning to reduce cross talk.

I built my own remo practice pad e-drums and plastic cymbals back in the late 90s and still have an old Alesis D4, so i know how to solder piezos to 1/4" jacks, but that's about the limit of my electrical skills.

I have already talked to Dmitri and will probably end up buying the 52 input megadrum kit. I really don't think that I want the case with the 1/4" inputs, I'd rather just wire the piezos straight to the board. I want this controller to be as light as possible, so I don't think that I want to mount a metal rack to it's underside, maybe something plastic?

I guess my main question is, do I wire the piezos directly to the grey wires coming off the IDC 2x20 and 2x10 male connectors? And does anyone have any pictures of what the wire looks like when you strip it back a little?

I also found this site where someone made their own, but I haven't gotten any response from them yet...

http://xene.it/index.php/en/xiloeng/41-xilov2-eng.html

[ibanman555]

You certainly can wire the pizeos directly to megadrum. You could even mount Megadrum right to your drum pad.

[bcrosier]

To resurrect this topic: I've been dreaming of a the same thing for a while now. I'm really interested in moving forward with such a project in the neat future, but being primarily an acoustic player some things elude/intimidate me.

I'd really like to hear more about (hopefully) some success stories of this. How did you construct the "keys"? What sound source are you using? Any particular difficulties/problems that arose in the process?

I've searched the forum and read the threads on the topics "mallet", "marimba", and "vibraphone", but I'm just really afraid of investing a modest amount of money and a large amount of time in such a project to discover that it really won't do what I want: reliably give me access to chromatic percussion (and non-percussion for that matter) sounds not just from a drum module, but from a regular midi sound module (such as a Roland SC-55 or a MIDI sampler) or PC based equivalents thereof.

Can MegaDrum give me this capability?

Sorry to be such a noob, but I've got to start somewhere...

Thanks in advance!

[airflamesred]

The megadrum is not the stumbling block with these. The 56 inputs will give you 4+ octaves.

As far as sounds go there is a fair bit of choice. You could pick up a proteus 1 for around £25 - reasonable marimba.

The pad construction is another matter.

[airflamesred]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJrO9VYEoGQ

[angr77]

Allan at digitalDrummer had a xylophone project...but I do believe he dropped the project.

This project was supposed to use a MegaDrum device...

Angr77

[bcrosier]

Thank you for the quick responses! The video definitely helped move my thinking along on how to construct the keyboard portion - I am definitely concerned about crosstalk issues as I am a heavy player, but on the other hand I don't think the keyboard will be subject to quite the beating I inflict upon the regular portion of the kit. Also with as many inputs as this would have, I would assume that consistency in the manufacture of each key would be important, so that one isn't hotter or less responsive than its neighbors yielding inconsistent response.

You are quite correct in that the Megadrum will have plenty of inputs - that's the obvious attraction for the unit. My concern stems more from how drum modules view notes versus other midi devices. This may stem from my gross ignorance of midi, and I may be completely incorrect on this - if so please correct me.

As I understand it, a "normal" keyboard sending a midi message to a sound module sends (among other things) a note on message, a note off message, and a note number indicating the what chromatic note is to be played by the module. How does the Megadrum module address (pardon the term) these issues? Note on is obvious (I think), but how does the sound module know when to terminate the note? Perhaps not that big an issue with percussion sounds, as they would have a natural termination, but what if I want to trigger another sound within the module (such as a string sound, which would presumably be looped to play as long as the note was held? Also, how do I set it up to send the appropriate note number? Do I just set each trigger to the same channel, but always the same note number?

Thank you again for the feedback!

[airflamesred]

The normal keyboard does generally work that way. Megadrum will give you much more flexability in that each bar/pad can have a different midi channel and note (maybe 2 or 3 notes per pad)

All the issues there are covered apart from note length. This is a global setting in MD but you can use it in conjunction with a sustain pedal.

Here's my effort viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1955

Just realized I shall have to get some current pics on there.

[bcrosier]

Nice work! That's really neat looking - please do post some more photos, and again thank you for your insights!

[shaugnd]

Chronicling an effort to build a MalletKat clone here: => http://www.megadrum.info/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1991 if anyone is interested.