DIY Drum Trigger

[mparsons]

What you need:

 

 

{censored} from Radio Shack. You need a 1/4" jack, a piezo, and some wire to extend the length a little bit. I assume you have a soldering iron {censored} like electrical tape and duct tape.

 

 

A drum, in this case, a drum with a mesh head. This is for silent practicing and soon recording.

 

Step 1:

 

Get the piezo out of its plastic casing. I got the wrong models, unfortunately, so my piezos were attached to a circuit board and I had to really fight it to get the element out. I got part number 273-060, and the recommended part is 273-073A. This is what it looked like when I was done:

 

 

Step 2:

 

I chose to make red positive and black ground. The inner ring on the piezo is positive and the outer is ground. The tip on the jack is positive, and the sleeve is ground... Easy enough right? Solder the red wire from the inner ring on the piezo to the tip on the jack, and the black wire from the outer ring to the sleeve of the jack.

 

Here is your drum trigger:

 

 

And... that's it. I plan on lengthening the cables a bit to put the jack in a more convenient place, and then duct taping it onto the drum. Then I'll surround the trigger with mouse pad material for a bit of protection, and attach it to the drum head ( Probably duct tape, haven't decided yet ). When I get my interface, hopefully tomorrow, I'll post a clip with me actually playing the drum with the trigger...

 

Until then, you'll have to suffice with me just tapping on it:

 

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=442291&songID=7894233

 

Trigger > Laptop sound card line in > KT Drum Trigger software > Superior 2.0 with no processing or editing at all. Nothing impressive but it proves that it works! When I make the "real" clip it'll be a lot better, I am sure, as I'll try to program some drums except for the snare and then "play" the snare along with it. Or maybe I'll "play" all the drums, one at a time... that'll be a disaster :lol

 

Anyway, this is part 1 of my "DIY Electronic Drum Set" series. Stay tuned for the next episode, where I put mesh heads on my entire kit, build triggers for all of them, and hook them up with a Behringer ADA8000... For tr00 drum playing and fake drum sound! :lol

[skaaks]

I did something similar, but I used an old practice pad for the housing. I also added a metal disc which the piezo was glued to to help capture vibrations when the edge of the drum head is hit. As for the conversion to sound, I'm using a microcontroller to convert the input to a MIDI signal that I pipe through DFH. All in all, I'm extremely happy w/ it. Best of luck w/ the rest of your kit!

[Unstrung]

Did a similar thing with this acoustic guitar piezo thing I had no use for... duct taped it to the batter head on the kick drum and we had death metal drum triggers! Then the drummer stomped on the cord and it was toast.

 

So we bought one of those red DDrum things.

[Blackwater]

Love to see drum threads around these parts!

[thinkpad20]

Neato. So this KT Drum Trigger software converts the input spikes into MIDI information?

[guitarsk8er239]

hmm, I wanna try this

[mparsons]

 

Neato. So this KT Drum Trigger software converts the input spikes into MIDI information?

 

 

Correct!

 

I mean, you don't even need a drum trigger, really. You can tap on a microphone to produce a beat, use KTDrumTrigger to convert it to MIDI, and then sample it with your drum program of choice...