MD config problems with yamaha dtx pads

[hurstaudio1]

Good evening all,

This has been a struggle for me. I won't go into too much detail but my first account on this forum flat out wouldn't let me log in no matter how many times I reset my password, so I had to make a new account.

I have a Yamaha DTX550K kit with 3 tp65 rubber pads and an xp80 tsc snare. I received my md56 unit several weeks ago and have been combing over the documentation and yet I still cannot get proper trigger settings.

Let me outline what I've done so far.

First, I followed the instructions to enable high level, hit my pad to see if it was between 300 and 900 as Dmitri suggested. Starting from a low value, like 100 or 64, I hit the pad and with threshold at 30 and gain at 4, the pad will sound as I have 2 midi connections to the unit and I hear the samples from SD2 get quieter when the value of high level increases. Eventually I got the snare around 430 and gain was at 5. I had to really pound on my pad to hear it. However, increasing the gain causes the pad, any of the pads to start machine gunning samples by itself. Dmitri insists on increasing the gain to get the high level value above 300 and below 900, and at 430 with gain of 5 there isn't much I can do. I tried changing the dynlvl and dyntim settings as he indicated they were to solve false/double triggering but neither of those settings changed a thing in either extremes. I have messed with every value and I cannot seem to get a nice smooth gradient of samples from low to high. As of now, I hit my pad, and from soft to hard the samples are loud, then as I hit slightly harder it gets quieter then even harder I'll get louder samples. If I play too fast or something or try and do buzz rolls it flat out doesn't work. About to rip my hair out. Most of these settings I dout anyone would need, like compression and octave shift. I never new pressrolls were a thing. I can use compression in my DAW, why does MD have an option for this. So many settings and personally Dmitri should really have an option under 'view' that is just a simplified version for things that really matter the most. Is there an actual user guide or manual out there someone has written besides the couple web pages?

I have tried using yamaha pad config files posted on https://powerhell.wordpress.com/about/z ... d-library/ and when I load each pad into mdm things get 10x worse. This was the first rout I tried. When I load each syx file to its corresponding section, the toms don't trigger, the snare, cymbals and kick alternate between triggering the hh and a random tom.

I haven't even gotten to the point of configuring my cymbals, I just want to understand what these different settings are. Honestly the documentation is a little washy IMO. I've configured other modules like alesis and the Yamaha I've got here but I'm just genuinely getting frustrated. I'm going to be building my own kit with triggers so I'll be getting rid of my dtx550 but before I do that I need to at least get this module configured.

When mega drum is reset to factory defaults the ride and toms are blasting (automatically triggering themselves) as if threshold is at 0 and sensativity is all the way up. But of course this module doesn't work like that. What I found out is that md thinks the pads are dual zone so I had to disable the second zone in order for the pads to stop triggering themselves. When I tried doing the same for the kick, the hh cymbal quit working and the kick is the only one I haven't gotten to stop triggering. I can turn threshold all the way up, gain all the way down and dynlvl and dyntim all the way up and it still is triggering.

I know I'm not an idiot, I've done this before, but this along with my user account not letting me log into this site even after resetting my password 20+ times and it wouldn't even accept the new password I was getting pretty mad.

Now that I'm here, and assuming next time I can log in to see replies to my thread, I'm hoping someone has the key to what my issue is.

I appreciate any and all responses. Have a good night!

[airflamesred]

Tick high level auto, set gain to 4 and hit the relevant pad. what high level do you get?

[hurstaudio1]

Yes, this is exactly what I did. I have threshold set to 30, gain set to 4. I hit my pad pretty hard 10 to 15 times and I get a max value of 230. That isn't high enough, so as I said I bumped gain to 5 and after beating my pad, again, very hard, I finally got it up to 429, and again, gain at 5. But with gain at 5, I am having the pad trigger itself as if a ghost was hitting the pad and I cannot get rid of it, and this is my problem. There are no other settings I can think of, and I've messed with just about everything, to stop the false triggering and get the threshold down as low as possible and increase the gain. It seems using this high level method is just another way of selecting a velocity curve, am I wrong?

[ignotus]

If the pad is auto-triggering, just raise the threshold until it stops. The ideal threshold value is the one when it stops auto-triggering and picks up light hits - you don't necessarily need it to be at a low value.

[hurstaudio1]

Take the snare for example. my xp80 is at threshold 30, gain 4. I just tried testing to see if raising the threshold until the auto triggering stopped then raising the gain to see if it would help, as you suggested. No luck. I took threshold all the way up to 46, still had triggering so up to 50 and moved gain up to 5 and it didn't really do much. I just have to end up hitting the pad even harder because now I'm raising the threshold, then I tried raising the gain and moving just one number on gain starts auto triggering, even if they are ghost triggers far apart, it is still doing it and I don't want it to. Does anyone have any playing examples of using this unit? Are you able to do buzzrolls and have a range of velocities?

[ignotus]

Sounds strange. When you raise the threshold just beyond stopping the auto-triggers, it should still pick up light hits. Does the pad have an adjustment pot? I ask because some Yamaha cymbals have them and that might help. Also, why do you raise the gain after stopping the auto-triggering? That will of course take you back to square 1 again. Threshold is just the value at which the module starts registering hits, and can differ wildly from pad to pad - just because you raise it doesn't mean you have to raise the gain too. If you need to hit hard after getting rid of the auto-triggering to register any hits or there's no dynamic range, the problem is probably elsewhere; raising gain isn't going to solve it.

There are other videos out there, but here's a demo of one of my pads.

[hurstaudio1]

Great, we're onto something.

I took a listen to your demo and it sounds like each strike is being represented accurately with good dynamic range.

You mention that if I'm still getting dropped hits after raising the threshold something else is probably the issue, great, let's discuss that further.

With the default values of 30 and 4, I can actually lower the threshold to 28 without any false triggering, but my light strikes/hits are not being caught. If I play fast like 1/32 notes I'm only getting, say 1/16 maybe or 1/8 notes. Do you see what I'm saying? Some notes aren't caught. I've also tried messing with the retrigger mask setting and that doesn't seem to have really any effect on the response of the pad. That's my problem I have no clue what else to try.

I do have a dial on the side of my snare but it doesn't do much of anything.

[ignotus]

It would help if you could post a screenshot of all your settings for that pad.
That dial is likely a potentiometer to raise and lower the resistance of the pad. Try it to see which way you have to turn it to raise/lower the resistance, and then dial it down to the minimum resistance and do the high level/threshold procedure again. What happens?

[dmitri]

Just a clarification on Gain, Threshold and HighLevel.
When you raise Gain you effectively raise sensitivity. As a result for the same signal voltage MegaDrum will register higher level.
When you raise Threshold you only change at which signal level a hit is registered. As a result for the same signal voltage MegaDrum will register the same level.

E.g (with Linear Curve selected):
1. Suppose with Gain 4 you find optimal settings with Threshold 20 (very light hits produce MIDI velocity ~1-3) and HighLevel 500 (only hardest hits produce MIDI velocity 127). If you raise Gain to 5, the optimal Threshold and HighLevel will be higher, say 24 and 600.
2. Suppose with Gain 4 you find optimal Threshold 20 but even with HighLevel around 300 even hardest hits will not produce MIDI with max velocity of 127. In this case you will need to raise Gain say to 6 so that optimal Threshold would be around 30 but you can get max MIDI velocity with HighLevel 400 and full dynamic range.
3. Suppose with Gain 4 you find optimal Threshold 20 but even with HighLevel 1023 even light/medium hits cause MIDI velocity to max out at 127. In this case you will need to lower Gain to say 2 so that optimal Threshold would be 15 but now with HighLevel 900 only hardest hits cause MIDI velocity to go up to 127.
4. Suppose with Gain 0 you find optimal Threshold 10 but even with HighLevel 1023 even light/medium hits cause MIDI velocity to max out at 127. This means the pad is too "hot" and you need to "cool" it down with a voltage divider.

[hurstaudio1]

Ugh. I recorded an 18 minute video showing my steps and me hitting the pad. You can't see me but I am wearing headphones and can hear superior drummer and you can see I follow Dmitri's steps and still get no progress. It is too big for youtube and I really don't want to have to reshoot the video. I guess I'll take screen shots and put them on my site and link to them and describe my results after each change. My USB ports keep giving out while using reaper and superior drummer and mega drum manager so I have to constantly keep plugging things back in. Giant pain. Maybe a powered hub?

Ok here we go again:

Step 1:
factory defaults (snare pads screen only) so we have a common starting place
http://www.codyhurst.com/defaultsettings.jpg
Since auto level is at 64 I get strong hits with little force. Currently no self triggering on head zone.

Step 2:
while gain=4, threshold=30, auto high checked, me smacking my pad extremely hard, harder than one would or should, high level now=339 (is this where I stop? It is above 300) I now have to hit my pad harder to get a louder sample sound
http://www.codyhurst.com/autolevelset.jpg
Fills and rolls are being dropped, forget about buzzrolls for now. I can almost tap my pad and get a soft sample, almost. No self triggering still.

At this point.......

Step 3: bump gain up to 5 and see what happens.
result: No point in showing you since it is only gain I'm changing here. Beginning to hear self triggering start. Rolls/fills still being dropped, even playing fast consecutive hits are dropped. All this seemed to do is start auto triggering on the pad, so i lowered gain back to 4.

Step4: Threshold
Ok, maybe I'm getting dropped hits because the threshold is set too high.
Result: Am only able to lower to about 28 before I start hearing the pad trigger itself again, so I can't do this.

Step 5: Then I remembered the xp80 snare pad should probably be set to what it is, '3 way yamaha pad'. I increased the high level to 339 like the head zone and here is what we have so far
http://www.codyhurst.com/snaresettings.jpg

Over all still no change, still getting dropped hits, and even though the note for the rim is set and the threshold and gain are the same as the head zone, I get no sample.

So far we've established that the high level at gain=4 is 339. We've also established that raising the gain to even 5 start causing the pad to auto trigger itself randomly.

Now:
Step 6: Because Dmitri indicated dynlvl and dyntim are associated with false triggering, I dropped both of those values to 0 and that actually helped a little, I can do rolls, not really buzzrolls because very very light hits aren't registered. So here is what we're looking at now
http://www.codyhurst.com/snare2.jpg

Step7: I realized that maybe increasing gain to maybe, say 5 would help. Well, it does but I get false ghost triggering so I can't use that. But maybe if we increase retrigger mask?
result: No effect at all.

Conclusion: I'm still not able to get very soft hits registered and I had to drop both dynlvl and dyntim to 0 to get near smooth rolling but it isn't perfect but it is better than what it was before. While the high level is above 300, at 339, increasing the gain to get more range causes the pad to auto trigger by increasing the gain by only 1.

If I can figure this pad out, I can figure the rest of them out. I still hear the rim click sound in the auto triggering by hitting the rim doesn't give me the sound even though ght ethreshold, gain and etc are nearly identical to the head zone.............??????????