Post-mortem: DIY practice pad trigger

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Post-mortem: DIY practice pad trigger

Postby kupooglop » Sat Feb 25, 2012 9:27 pm

I noticed every now and then a member posts a question about the best type of trigger. I decided to post the results of my DIY practice pad based kick drum. After about a year of severe double pedal punishment, I noticed crummy performance from my kick drum. It started with increasing x-talk and false triggers. I could tune these things out in md initially, but it got worse over time. The performance degraded into machine-gun drum triggers, multiple notes, and finally midi log jams that resulted in system crashes in the various instruments in my midi network. At this point, I started taking stuff apart. Lo and behold, this is what I found.
DSCI0283.jpg
From the outside it looks like it would work pretty good. On the inside, it was a different story.
DSCI0268.jpg
Plastic sheet tore & foamy junk is disintegrating.
DSCI0282.jpg
Once foamy junk was gone, the beaters started torquing the metal plate the piezo was glued onto.
DSCI0277.jpg
Flipping the plate over reveals the failure. Once the plate started rotating, the wires began to break. In conclusion, I will no longer use practice pads for triggers. This is why:
1. They are great when you only need ONE! Once you have two or more, x-talk becomes intractable.
2. They are WAAAAAYYYY TOOOOO HOOOTTTT!!!!! After months of fighting with voltage dividers, half wave rectifiers, full wave rectifiers, voltage regulators, high pass filters, I finally got a combination that gave useful results. I became annoyed when I built an A to E trigger and got useful results in a couple of days.
3. They are not very durable and they have a short lifespan. The pictures speak for themselves.
In the future all toms, snares, kick drums I build will be A to E. After messing with practice pads, A to E drums turn out to give far superior results with a lot less effort. Now to figure out how to keep the leads from vibrating off my DIY cymbals.
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kupooglop
 
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