Super Easy Drum triggers

[abechap024]

Hi All,
I have a metal band coming at the end of the month and I can already tell just by the list of bands they are most influenced by that we are going to be using a lot of triggers. I would rather not use the triggers but I would like the option. 

I was thinking of making some sort of contact pickup that when hit produces a unique tone frequency so I could record all the triggers to one audio track and then use EQ to filter the different hits to seperate tracks then apply sample replacement. I know that MIDI would be the first option but it seems that peizo to midi converters are a little hard to come by and I think this Peizo frequency trigger thing just might work....

My question is, anyone every try to do this before? Any luck with it? and what If I made some sort of notch filter for each peizo? I would probably only need 4 or 5.
so I could notch out everything but say 100 hz (narrow peak) for kick then for low tom narrow peak at 500hz etc...
I know it might be a bitch to set up properly, but I have a matrix mixer to do the job I won't be using much during tracking
Thanks
AC

 

[conleycd]

There are a billion DIY e.drum resources.  Some googling will reveal.

You have a bunch of options.  You can stick triggers on each drum - $1 ones from digikey.com or wherever.  There are tons of cheap piezo to midi converters (Alesis D4 or Trigger IO).

I think the better choice (and probably cheaper) if you have mics and a multichannel interface is Steven Slate Trigger EX.  http://www.slatedigital.com/trigger.php

for $130 you can the EX version.  Well worth the cost compared to soldering jacks onto piezos, buying an interface, etc.

You can use SSD Metal drum samples, load your own, or trigger any midi unit.

CC

 

[12afael]

I play metal and the drumer of my band have an old alesis d4, I must say it have a lot of delay, if you want to use midi try something more modern, the roland td3 is very acurate. 

 

[helterbelter]

Just record the Piezos to seperate audiotracks. In case you have enough audio inputs of course. Retrigger it from there using drumagog or whatever.

I know a dutch metal studio engineer that uses the dry piezo signal as audio, mixed together with a kickmic to get a more clicky sound. Doesn't even use soundreplacer or such. The piezo audio adds a subtle difference to the micsound, which makes the kicks easier to mix and still naturalsounding.

D4 is a piece of ****. But it has a kicksound that's cult on it's own. Clicky, not dynamic, each hit, hard or soft, is a full TACK !. For full blast doublebass power THE signature sound, but everything else of the D4 sucks horseshit.

 

[abechap024]

haha, thats an awesome idea just to mix the peizo straight in the audio!! And I only have 8 tracks-in right now so I want to use them wisely... I'm hoping I can figure out this to beable to use 1 audio track to decode encode all the hit information.
I don't want to mess with midi- at this point thanks for all the info guys.
AC

 

[helterbelter]

8 tracks.......
oh boy...
In that case I advice you to get a Roland TD-5 drummodule on ebay. This is an old drummodule that works magnificent, and it shouldn't cost you that much. The sounds aren't as good as the modern stuff, but the trigger>midi interface is excellent. None of the Alesises reach that level of performance, even the modern ones aren't that precise.

I have worked several years as professional metal drummer, and recording engineer. Live I used an Alesis DM5 for triggering the kicks, but at home and in the studio I kept using the Roland which I bought on discount 16 years ago. I never felt the need to buy something else.

 

[fantomas]

I think is a pretty good idea.

I believe piezo triggers have different resonant frequenciesdepending on size, shape, etc. Would it be practical to use 4 piezos with different resonant frequency and send them to 4 filters tuned to isolate as much as possible each peak frequency and sum the 4 signals to mono?

If its practical it would be easy then to isolate each trigguer in drumagog or other trigguer soft.

 

[abechap024]

Thats a good idea to exploit the different resonant FRQ of the different peizos. Then send each one through a cheep'n'dirty notch filter and then to some sort of cheep'n'crappy mixer to Pro tools, decode and then sample replace it and make it sound listenable(hopefully). Who knows maybe even mix in a little of the raw audio for attack.

If that doesn't work then at least I'll have the Triggers for a TD-5  ;D ;D ;D

I probably want the notch filters at least on octave a part no?

edit: I've been saying notch filters like a smeg hed, I meant bandpass filters with very high Q

edit: found a good article on filters from TI http://focus.ti.com/lit/an/sloa093/sloa093.pdf
thanks
ac

 

[helterbelter]

edit: found a good article on filters from TI http://focus.ti.com/lit/an/sloa093/sloa093.pdf

Ah, that's good reading !