DIY electronic drums - cheap!

[neirbo]

I've been reading a few threads here about electonic drums, but haven't seen anything about DIY (do it yourself) drums. So, I figured I'd post some info on the subject.

Electronic drums can be very useful for a variety of reasons (quiet, sound font use etc.), but are obviously really expensive. There is a website called http://www.electronicdrums.com/ that has some simple, cheap plans to make your own pads, so that all you need to buy is the module. With some digging around for used gear, and with some soldering practice, I was able to make mesh head pads (like Roland's Vdrums) for about $40 per pad. My favorite pads are made from old rototoms and Roland mesh pads, but you can also use Remo practice pads or almost anything else you want to hit. The guts of any pad by any manufacturer is the Peizo transducer. They transfer vibrations into electrical signals, and cost less than $2.00 at Radio shack. Everything else in a pad is just the shell, head, and some way to transfer signals from the head to the transducer (usally some kind of foam cone).

The website costs a little to join (maybe $30, I forget exactly), but it is well worth it. You can make pads every bit as good as Roland's, even with position sensing, pretty easily. Pick up a used Roland TD-5, and you could easily get a solid, basic setup for a few hundred bucks or less. The TD-5's sounds are not so great, but I use it to trigger soundfonts through my computer.

I am not affiliated with electronicdrums.com in any way. I just wanted to pass on a good deal to folks interested in a cheaper way to get into electronic drumming. Another good site is Vdrums.com. They have a very good forum site with a DIY section.

Also, for used rotos and sound modules to build your edrums check out musicgoround.com

 

[Whoopysnorp]

Cool. When Devo was first starting up in the mid-70s, their then-drummer (Jim Mothersbaugh, who left the band before they made any albums) made his own electronic drums. Since this was the mid-70s, they sounded very much like homemade electronic drums. But that's what they wanted. Nevertheless, I'm glad they used acoustic kits instead (at least until the 80s). Jim went to work for Roland after leaving the band, by the way.

 

[neirbo]

I just wanted to clarify one thing from my first post, having remembered how confusing the jargon can be when I first was trying to figure this stuff out. I am not claiming that you can build your own drum module, just the pads. An electronic drum kit is like any other MIDI instrument. It has two basic parts: the sythesizer (called the "brain" or "module" by e-drummers) and the triggering device that sends signals to the synth (e.g. a MIDI keyboard). The drum pads I am talking about is just the triggering device, and are very simple electronically. They basically just transmit a signal of varying strength which is translated into volume. Some modules (e.g. Roland's TD-8 and TD-10) can also get position information, so that a hit near the edge of a pad has a slightly different tone than a hit near the center, but this position sensing feature does not complicate the pad design. Since the sounds are all generated by the module, ANY pad that is built correctly willtrigger the exact same sounds as a Roland, or Ddrum etc. pad. the only differences could be in the sensitivity of the pad, and the durability.

If you are an electrical engineer, or a drummer with a flower pot on his head, maybe building a module is for you. For the rest of us, I'd suggest buying your favorite module and building some pads.

 

[Roel]

Building the module is even a complicated task for an engineer... It would be possible to measure the signals coming from the pads, and getting the necessary information from these signals to know when to fire up which sample. (Would need some experimenting though...)

But the sampler itself would be rather hard, since you need to get the right samples in your roms etc...

The thing to do here would be just a 'module' that recieves the signals from the pads, and sends out midi info to a sampler that will generate the sounds.

Even as an EE, I would buy the module... But I'm not a drummer, so I don't really care.

 

[Whoopysnorp]

Yeah, I figured you were talking about just the pads...

"Drummer with a flower pot on his head." Ha ha, that's funny.

 

[Krystof01]

I made my own electronic kit about 6 months ago; I've made it as true to a real drum kit as possible. I have an a snare (8 inch), hit hat (which is semi-movable 6 inch), floor tom (10 inch), 5 toms (all 8 inch), and the best part, 3 fully movable cymbals, ride and two crashes.

Off course I can change what each one does. I am triggering a Alesis DM5 module (I'm a guitarist, not a drummer so this is for deemo work only and very effective too).

Each pad is velocity sensitive using a transducer on the underside of each pad. I didn't even buy practise pads or anythuing drum related, the whole kit including a real kick pedal, all the pads and tranducers and the custom built frame all came to under £150 (about $200); thats for a 12 piece kit (not including the module though (that cost about the same again bought second hand on ebay).

I must get a picture to show you one of these days.

 

[cordura21]

checkout Paia products . They have something called the Midi Brain cheap. They even have the schematics, I think.

 

[boomtap]

I am thinking about doing this, but I am leary of how they might work. Are they as good as the store bought drums?

 

[earthboundrec]

It wouldn't be that much of a task though to run the midi data from the pads to a computer drum machine though. Just load up the samples and create different templates for different sets and such. If you already have some type of sequencer on you computer it'd save a lot of money compared to dropping $$ on a module. It'd also be much more versatile as you could tailor it to your specific needs.

 

[travelin travis]

some free sites for diy e-drums and "midi box"

alot of various info on diy edrums
http://edrum.for.free.fr/

all you need to know to build a midi box for your edrums. it has 14 velocity sensitive inputs
http://www.midibox.org/edrum/

i wonder why midibox.org does'nt show up in google when searching for diy edrums? maybe because it's free info?

one more, a link from edrum.for.free. some videos of diy edrums in action:

http://edrum.for.free.fr/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=4

i don't mean to discourage anyone from electronicdrums.com, even though it is a pay site. i have read that there is some very good info on that site.

 

[Tim Brown]

I am thinking about doing this, but I am leary of how they might work. Are they as good as the store bought drums?

Yes, they will work as well as storebought E-drums.

I have a set of ddrums, and all they really are - I've taken one apart before -is a glorified Remo "tune-able" practice pad with a piezo sensor in it.



Tim

 

[travelin travis]

It wouldn't be that much of a task though to run the midi data from the pads to a computer drum machine though. Just load up the samples and create different templates for different sets and such. If you already have some type of sequencer on you computer it'd save a lot of money compared to dropping $$ on a module. It'd also be much more versatile as you could tailor it to your specific needs.

do you have any ideas/designs on getting the midi data into a drum machine/module or pc?

 

[Tim Brown]

do you have any ideas/designs on getting the midi data into a drum machine/module or pc?

You would have to have an interface that would allow you to record the strike of each electronic drumpad individually.
Then have each track trigger a sound in say, drumagogue, or some kind of VST software. I don't record on a PC, so I don't know exactly what you would need or how well it would work, but he had a discussion about this a few months ago, and some people tried it and it worked.

I don't think you could do it "live".



Tim

 

[MichaelM]

That brain that Travis linked outputs the data using a regular midi cord. Read up on the site. Each trigger has a midi note that it sends, and these can be changed. All the midi data is sent on midi channel 10 by default, but you can also change that. So, all you need to do is hook the brain up to the midi in on your computer/synth/sound module and it works just like any other piece of midi gear. SO, if you have a sound module, you could use the thing live.

 

[WERNER 1]

I played a small gig last year for a friend at a glorified coffee house. We were told that they really didn't want any drum kits up there, ...just some percusion type stuff....

Well there was a band that played after us, and their drummer had a home made e drum kit that was on a 2x3 ft. board, and all the pads were really small...like 4-5 inches in dia. The thing sounded killer! I was really impressed with the sounds he came up with.

I don't know any of the details on it, but it was real COOL!

 

[daav]

I built such a set with remo practive pads and an ALesis DM5 a few years ago. Spent 6 hours in home depot and was able to make all the mounting hardware from, well, hardware as well. It was a fun project, but overall, unsatisfying.

I would think this is a very approachable project, but i would not reccoment the practive pad option. They were quieter than acoustic drums, but still pretty loud, and I never really appreciated the canned samples from the DM5 as much as i would have liked, perhaps with a better brain, and some tweaking it could have been better. As it was, it was still fairly expensive to build after buying the DM5 for ~$300 back then. Most annoying, was that it did not seem to play naturally at all, especially with hi-hat action. I used a keyboard sustain pedal for the hi hat control, and unlike a natural hihat, where you can hit the hats, and open just a bit to get a nice drawn-out shhhhkkt sound, you had : closed, open (meaning, lift your foot off the sustain pedal comepletely, then hit the hat trigger, so the timing was a bit diofferent thant he acoustic hat action) or just the hat closing sample. No nuance here. I would not recommend the inverted kick triggers that just clamp into the kick pedal, i built an item to mount one of the small practice pad triggers for a more natural kick.

One very fun thing, was to put the electronic kit through some serious distortion and effects, for huge crazy tones.

So I guess from my experience, i would say to try the route with the highest quality triggers and brain. I think that if i were doing this now, i could make something really decent, but I guess i burnt myself out on it with the first project.

By the way, i still have the DM5, and the triggers and cable i built, along with some commercial pintech triggers. If anyone wants to try to build off what i did before, PM me, I'd sell all that stuff reasonably.

Daav.,

 

[travelin travis]

I built such a set with remo practive pads and an ALesis DM5 a few years ago. Spent 6 hours in home depot and was able to make all the mounting hardware from, well, hardware as well. It was a fun project, but overall, unsatisfying.

I would think this is a very approachable project, but i would not reccoment the practive pad option. They were quieter than acoustic drums, but still pretty loud, and I never really appreciated the canned samples from the DM5 as much as i would have liked, perhaps with a better brain, and some tweaking it could have been better. As it was, it was still fairly expensive to build after buying the DM5 for ~$300 back then. Most annoying, was that it did not seem to play naturally at all, especially with hi-hat action. I used a keyboard sustain pedal for the hi hat control, and unlike a natural hihat, where you can hit the hats, and open just a bit to get a nice drawn-out shhhhkkt sound, you had : closed, open (meaning, lift your foot off the sustain pedal comepletely, then hit the hat trigger, so the timing was a bit diofferent thant he acoustic hat action) or just the hat closing sample. No nuance here. I would not recommend the inverted kick triggers that just clamp into the kick pedal, i built an item to mount one of the small practice pad triggers for a more natural kick.

One very fun thing, was to put the electronic kit through some serious distortion and effects, for huge crazy tones.

So I guess from my experience, i would say to try the route with the highest quality triggers and brain. I think that if i were doing this now, i could make something really decent, but I guess i burnt myself out on it with the first project.

By the way, i still have the DM5, and the triggers and cable i built, along with some commercial pintech triggers. If anyone wants to try to build off what i did before, PM me, I'd sell all that stuff reasonably.

Daav.,

I have looked into building an edrum kit pretty extensively. I think I will just for fun after I get the rest of the equipment I really need.

To me, the way to go would be to buy a really cheap acoustic drum kit, maybe even a junior drum kit, and put mesh heads and triggers on it. Edrum.for.free has some very good ideas for making diy mesh heads, triggers, a hi hat controller (u gotta check it out), and ecymbals. Check out the videos on edrum.for.free of Pfozz and his diy edrum hihat. Amazing. I would get a decent bass drum pedal and hi hat stand along with the cheap acoustic kit. For the midi conversion, midibox.org seems to have a pretty good design and everyone i talked to over there liked it alot. It's pretty cheap to build too.