Foam cone and some DM5 cymbal mod

[privatex]

Foam cone is very important part of good trigger pad and I tried every combination of materials that you can imagine. Many people use sanding blocks but from my experience it is too soft. You know that piezo pick up vibrations of mesh head so material of cone must be hard enough to transfer all spectre of vibrations which sanding block foam just cant do (some vibrations are absorbed by soft foam-it sound little wierd to me).
I find that eva foam from this swimming floats auxiliary tool is perfect for our trigger cone:

It has perfect hardness and it's very nice for forming cone with sandpaper. My drum pads sound much better now. One more feature: it can be formed with very small top of coupe so hot spot almost disappear. How nice is that :)
Another project that I work these days are an old cymbal pads from Alesis DM5. I bought them cheap but when I opened that was surprise for me. They have groves for edge switch and places for bell piezos. Isolation system for bow/edge and bell was there too so they are same as 3zones cymbals but with only one piezo builded in them. They sold this pads as single zone cymbals but they are actually 3 zones design. So I made edge switches, installed them and it work great. I had some luck here :)
(http://www.ebay.com/itm/Alesis-cymbal-for-DM5-/271733257311
There it is, updates from my diy room. Maybe someone get an idea for his projects. Cheers.

[airflamesred]

Good man, and thanks for posting. Does this harder material allow for a lower minscan?
I bought my daughter a DM6 for Christmas which, once it gets the MD/VST treatment, should be quite nice. I'll have a look at the DM6 cymbals and see if it's a similar story with them.

[privatex]

From my experience minscan can be lowered, honestly I cant play snare with minscan above 40 (this material wont let you do that). It works great for normal medim strokes but for any faster playing there will be mistriggering. Here is sc of my snare drum configuration (it continuously changing)

[airflamesred]

Well, I've always wondered wether it's the hardness of the cone, or the shape, or the size of drum. Probably a combination of all 3.
As a matter of interest on your settings, are you getting better results with gain at 2 and the lower high level?

[ignotus]

Nice - I used the exact same swimming aid to make cones! I've also tried all sorts of materials... Some sanding blocks are softer than others. I had the chance to give a Roland cone a squeeze once and was surprised at how soft it was, I'd always thought they were harder. Right now I'm using a combination of swimming aid foam with the last 5mm tip in contact with the mesh made with soft sanding block foam - I think it's the best I've achieved so far but once in a while I always try something new...

Nice job with the cymbals! How did you make the edge switches? My 3-way cymbal is on hold awaiting material to arrive in the post. Hopefully I'll have something to show in a few weeks.

[privatex]

'or the size of drum' ou yes 10,12'' works perfect, but 13''+ are trouble.
Definitely better with low gain/hiLvl.
It's very interesting to cover top of cone with some soft foam to make contact between hard eva foam and mesh head better for reducing hotspot phenomenon.
Switches are, as usual, headache. I tried few times but there's always some problems. At the end I noticed that rubber cover have some kind of protuberance to rest against the switch, so I cover it with copper foil. As second part of switch I cover plastic grove on cymbal too and there it is, switch with some 2mm gap between contacts. It work fine now. I'll try with your switch method too. Must buy some orange today :)

[privatex]

End result:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2fdf6 ... vice_music

[ignotus]

Nice work! How exactly did you configure it to get such good bow/bell separation in your MD? I suppose it uses 2 stereo inputs, doesn't it?

[privatex]

Yes two stereo inputs, but bell use only head/bow as single piezo so basically it's mono input in use. Beside kick drum which have mono input all other inputs on my megadrum device are stereo, so for two cymbals I had lost two mono inputs but we have bunch of them, who cares.
Most deserving for good zones separation is construction of cymbal. Bow and bell are separately attached on cover that comes on top of them. They are fastened by means of screws to the plastic cover but they dont have direct connection to each other any more.
All I did was set up the rubber pieces to the screws (between the plastic pieces). I had some zones separation problems too but this resolve that problem (+I had to cut off those 4 plastic links between bow and bell. This was one zone cymbal version).



I must add that, for me, piezo is better for bell. It gives smooth response and have longer velocity interval than switch + piezo (which is further from the point of attack... you know what I mean).