New Roland CY-15, bell extends to bow 1 inch

[Rob]

I'm not sure what's going on with your cymbal but I do recommend updating to version 1.6 as it fixed a few issues with inputs setup a Roland 3-zone rides using two cables.

[thedrumdoctor]

It seems to be good after the update, but the bell seems to have no dynamics now! It's just loud. I guess I need to see if I can do bell calibration on its own and failing that, try the single cable bell-sense method.

[Rob]

You've adjusted the bell scaler?

[thedrumdoctor]

No, I haven’t tried that yet. I’m now wondering if it’s a switch problem with my cymbal, because the edge crash sound changing to bell is intermittent. Having said that, it worked fine with the TD-20 right up until swap-over. I’ve sold the TD-20 now so can’t test

If I understand the CY-15R, the bell works on a switch sensor which provides an on/off scenario. Hit the bell, the switch transmits MIDI, move off the bell to the bow and the bell ‘closes’.

It seems if I play a bell pattern then try to ‘wash’ the edge of the ride, the bell switch remains ‘open’. In order to ‘close’ it, hitting the cymbal on the bow area away from its most ‘sensitive’ part (over to the right of the normal playing area) seems to restore the edge sound. I am using the drum map for AD2 as well.

I want to replace the 15” with a Lemon 18” anyway, because a 15” cymbal is a poor excuse for a Ride diameter to differentiate playing areas, considering the average stick-length is 16”. I can see how your bell-sense idea could be a game-changer combined with bow/edge trigger design on bigger cymbals.

[Rob]

I'd be helpful to see your eDRUMin settings for the CY-15R.

The bell circuit is a normally open switch. When you hit the bell hard enough, it closes the switch momentarily. eDRUMin looks for the switch closing. If it does, then it sends the bell note. It's pretty simple stuff. If your switch was somewhat pinched, it could close briefly while hitting other parts of your cymbal, but it's unlikely. The bell switch is notoriously difficult to trigger on Roland rides, so unless your cymbal is really beat up or has been modified, I doubt that is the problem. This difficulty in triggering the bell is precisely why I created Bell Sense.

It seems if I play a bell pattern then try to ‘wash’ the edge of the ride, the bell switch remains ‘open’. In order to ‘close’ it, hitting the cymbal on the bow area away from its most ‘sensitive’ part (over to the right of the normal playing area) seems to restore the edge sound. I am using the drum map for AD2 as well.

Even if the bell switch is stuck 'closed', the eDRUMin would always prioritize the edge switch over the bell. So if the bell switch was closed and you hit the edge, then the eDRUMin would trigger the edge and not the bell.

[thedrumdoctor]

I've worked it out and file under 'pilot error'....

What I had done was map the 3-zone cymbal to a 2-zone cymbal in the AD drum-map part of the software. I must have clicked the wrong cymbal and didn't see the cymbal label pop up on-hover. So the 3-zone trigger was mapped wrongly! Now it plays beautifully.