Just installed positional sensing add on board

[dsteinschneider]

I installed the positional sensing addon board and placed the provided jumper on POS. I've read through these threads:

Postional Sensing Testing:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1215

Positional sensing addon board for sale
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2052&hilit=postional+sensing+board&start=10

Difference in input sensitivity
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3209&p=32136&hilit=postional+sensing+board#p32136

I have a Ludwig 14" snare with UFO Drums ebridge center mounted cone piezo and a 3 ply mesh head (Billy Blast).

For the Snare Pad settings I chose POS Level 2, Pos Low 10 and Pos High 20 (based on Dmitri saying a Drumtec mesh pad worked with those settings). I noticed someone in the above threads mentioned that they had to raise MinScan to 80 to see the CC16 messages come through. I also had to raised MinScan to get the CC16 controller messages to send.

I'm using Superior Drums 2 running in VST host Cantabile 3. The midi monitor in Cantabile shows CC16 coming through. I'm getting consistent cc0 for hits in the center and mid center.

I have to hit edge hits pretty hard to get cc127. What setting would improve that? Maybe I have the head tension to tight?

In SD2 in the Construct window I chose instrument snare and then listened to the center and edge articulations to know what I should be hearing. I have it set to Zone Control and CC16. When I play the pad's edge the I'm not hearing the same edge sound. The midi monitor shows cc127 and then note 38. Maybe it's because I have to hit it harder?

Thanks in advance for any advice on this.

[dmitri]

As per viewtopic.php?p=14340#p14340

You can also enable some debugging if you set Latency to an odd value (...,37,39,41,... ) . In the top row of the LCD it will show relative position of the hit as calculated by MegaDrum: ^ symbol shown more to the left for centre hits and more to the right for close to rim hits.
In the bottom row it will show 3 values with every hit: the first is used for calculating position when Positional is set to 1, second - when Positional is set to 2 and third - when Positional set to 3. Use these values to adjust PositionalLow and PositionHigh.

What values do you get when you hit centre, off centre and near rim with each of Positional setting 1,2 and 3?

[dsteinschneider]

I navigated on the LCD to PositionalLv

I found that Pos Level 1, Pos Low 10 and Pos High 15 give me quite good positional sensing. The Caret "^" is consistently to the far left for center hits in a 6 inch radius. Then as I move to the 6-10" radius it's in the middle and then 10-14 it's to the far left. The number to the right of the pipe character "|" is 20 for the center down to 0 for the rim. Usually it's 18 to 1

I'm not seeing the bottom row 3 values. Where should I navigate to so I can see those?

I'm one firmware behind (20181218). I downloaded the mdfwupdate and megadrum_20190602.zip and will apply it. I wanted to get the positional sensing working with everything as is.

BTW, maybe someone who has SD2 can clue me in on making sure I have it set correctly for cc16 control of snare articulation. I have the snare set on articulation Zone Control in the construct window. My midi monitor sees cc16 coming through at 0 for center area hits and moving to 127 for rim. So everything is working but I don't think I'm hearing the change in articulation.

[dsteinschneider]

Figured out SD 2 issue. I went into the mapping tab and chose edrums specific and I'm getting my snare articulations. It's working really well!

[dsteinschneider]

I'm back to update that everything is working better than I initially hoped for when I bought the MegaDrum. Adding the positional sensing board and working my way through getting it dialed in resulted in much improved response on all the pads (mostly from raising MinScan).

It also prompted me to finally get a handle on Superior Drummer 2 mapping. I switched the SD2 drum map from whatever the default was to edrum specific>generic. At that point everything is working, including the cc16 zone control from the snare. To get the hi-hat working I finally realized that I had to scroll down in the mapping side bar to see Tip Trigger, Edge Trigger and Bell Trigger. Two of those had values of 7 and 8 so I assigned 9 to the remaining one. I was never getting the bell sound before on the hi-hat.

The 14" 3 ply mesh snare is triggering much better at MinScan 80. I never noticed before that it was recommended that MinScan be at least 50 for a large mesh head pad. The triggering is spot on now and the positional sensing is working as expected.

Does the postional sensing add on board improve the triggering in general. All the pads seem to be triggering better after I re-adjusted the high levels.

[airflamesred]

And megadrum triumphs once again. Congratulations

[dsteinschneider]

And megadrum triumphs once again. Congratulations

A drummer who uses a TD11 stopped by yesterday. He did an A2E conversion using his own custom fabricated trigger mounts that are "hub and spoke" style with piezo assemblies purchased from r-drums. We first adjusted the springs on the pearl kick pedals. He recommended increasing the head tension on all the shells which we then did. At that point he thought a few things were wrong with the triggering that I hadn't noticed because, to misquote Leonard McCoy, "I'm a bass player, not a drummer".

I showed him how MegaDrum Manager works and we noticed that lighter hits were double triggering. In my testing I always used mid to high level velocity hits to test. I then went back and re-read all the mesh head setup tips here an on vdrums.com and noticed I had missed recommended steps with regard to pad setup. For the first time I followed Ignotus' steps I found on vdrums:

1- Tick the HighLevel Auto box. Whack the pad as hard as your hardest hits are likely to be, a few times. Untick the box. What number do you get?
2- Raise Minscan to 40.
3- Lower Retrigger Mask to 1. Lower Threshold until the pad picks up the lightest hits you want it to pick up. You will likely be getting double hits when you hit it harder. If you don't, all the better.
4- If you get double hits, raise Dynlevel until single hits (soft to hard) only produce one note. In the unlikely event that you get to 15 and you still get double hits, raise Dyntime one step at a time until they go away. You can also try raising Threshold one at a time.

EDIT: Actually used a version of the above Ignotus updated:
The (slightly different) way I go about setting a mesh pad is this:
1.- Set HighLevel Auto to 'yes' and whack the pad hard 10 times. Look at the number you get in 'HighLevel'. If it's between 500 and 1000 move to step 2. If it's below 500, raise gain and repeat the process. If it's above 1000, reduce gain and repeat the process. Ideally it should be around 800-900 but if it's at around 500 it's still fine.
2.- Reduce Threshold until the pad starts auto-triggering. Raise it by 2.
3.- Set Retrigger to 1 and Dyntime and Dynlevel to 0. You'll probably get loads of double triggers. Raise Dyntime to 24 and then raise Dynlevel one number at a time until double triggers go away. Don't go higher than 4 or 5 (I find it starts missing hits if higher than 5, YMMV). If you still get double triggering start raising Retrigger until they go away.
The pad should now be triggering fairly decently. Fine-tuning involves tweaking the above parameters, there's not much else to it apart from choosing a curve that suits the dynamics you want.
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This fixed the issue and even I noticed that the drums were responding better, especially the kick drum.

[dsteinschneider]

Is there a similar set of steps to really dial in the responsiveness of a Yamaha PCY135/PCY155 ?

[dmitri]

You can use the same set of steps with Yamaha cymbals or any other pads/cymbals.

[dsteinschneider]

Thanks for the heads up that the steps for the cymbals are the same. I would add that before you do those steps do the "Set All EdgeSw" and "Set All BellSw" routines first so the Thresholds for those are set so there is zone separation.

For any other people new to edrums I recommend finding someone who has edrums experience to come over in person. Even if that person just has an all Roland kit they will play your setup and notice issues you either didn't notice or didn't even know that something isn't right. We also cleaned up some things in the mixer in SD2 so the kit sounded more realistic through the pair of Alto TS115a's I'm using to monitor.