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Electrifying a drum set.


WRGKMC

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I know bout piezo sensors for acoustic sets and have tried that before with less then stellar results

 

Had this idea come to me this morning and haven't been able to shake.

If you had a steel disk glued to the head and used a magnetic pickup the head would essentially be a microphone diaphragm.

I did a little looking around and those thin rare earth refrigerator magnets might be the ticket.

 

I was thinking what could be done with a magnetic pickup over using mics or contact pickups and its got me fairly inspired to at least try it.

 

You could permanently mount the pickups in a drum and install jacks to plug the drums in.

You could also run them through a snake to a mixer.

 

You could use effects like you would on a guitar from overdrive to echo. You could harmonize the pitches, use chorus or phase,

just about anything your use on a guitar or bass including compression and not be worried about mics feeding back.

 

I figured you could use it on cymbals too but the cymbals would need to be stationary or the pickup would need to move with them.

 

A Hi Hat and snare may be difficult too. I think the snare itself is steel so it may be magnetic as is. The high hat with a moving top would be tough. I'd have to have the pickup mounted on the top and move with the top cymbal.

 

Cowbell? Should be magnetic and the pickup would pick its ring up.

 

No idea what the sound quality would wind up being. I suspect the top end of cymbals may need to be supplemented but even if the drums are the only things that work effectively, can you imagine the compressed overdrive you could give them?

 

I have some double sided tape and since my drums have dual heads it would be easy to just give one a quick try. Even if I have to mix it with the miced sound it may do some cool things that don't work as well with a mic.

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Sounds like you're talking about something similar to a banjo pickup. You'd probably be served best by picking up the vibration of the head so a snare being steel wouldn't make any difference. As for cymbals and cowbells, it would depend on what they're made of. A bronze cymbal or brass cowbell wouldn't work without something ferric attached.

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Not exactly. The principals are the same but the implementation would be different. A banjo pickup is closer to being an inductive contact mic and requires a sturdy mount to maintain even pressure. It wouldn't work on a drum head in any case. You whack heads and you'd damage that kind of unit.

 

 

The trick is to have an air gap between the head and inductor just like guitar strings have an air gape between the strings and pickup.

 

I 'd only need a small magnetic film added to the head which shouldn't dampen the head enough to influence the tone much. The thin flexible refrigerator magnet cut into a thin strip would likely work as well as a guitar string does.

A short piece of guitar string glued would likely work too. Mounting the pickup to the drum mute knob so its height /tilt might be an option too.

 

They are all thing you invent as you go along and come up with fixes through necessity.

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$800 ~ $1200 for the pads? Screw that. You can easily buy an electronic drum set for that amount.

 

You can fix anything by throwing money at it but the trick is to do something cool which "doesn't" cost a allot of money.

 

First off I'm not a pro drummer. I simply have a decent studio set for recording and I occasionally experiment capturing different sounds.

 

My idea is to see what an inductive coils can do to pick up the sound from a head. It does a relatively decent job on strings, why not a drum head?

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