I would love to hear more about these DIY experiments of yours. Care to share some more details and pics?
Now that my A to E kit is fully constructed and working great, I've run out of things to tinker with. Can't just spend all my free time playing the damn thing!
Welcome to the eDRUMin world! Would be very interested in learning more about the piezo wire for the rim sensor.
Thanks,
Doug
I would like to know as well. At first, I was thinking of using hot glue to directly glue it to the rim, but embedding a piece inside rim rubber trim would be the way to go if there were room in the rim rubber to do so.
To those that responded to my post on piezo cable-- glad to see some interest generated. I've had a piece of sample cable from well over 10 years ago when I was deep into e-drums. Lost interest in them when the state of the art tech wasn't giving me what I wanted. My background is in piezo sensors (quartz) and recognized that piezo cable would be a VERY interesting option for drum triggering. With the recent advancements in e-drum tech, I got interested again. I have done an A/E conversion on a full size Pearl kit. So now is the perfect time to really dig into piezo cable potential. I have some pretty encouraging preliminary results. I want to spread the word and get others onboard to perform experiments and share their results and ideas. Lets find out if this stuff is really useful, or if I'm just up in the night! As most of the DIY'ers have figured out, edrumin is an awesome test tool for experimental triggers. I have been away for a few days, but will post some photos in the near future.
A shout out to MisterE for posting about this on the vdrum forum. As i said, I really just wanted to light a little fire and hope experimenters will push the envelope with this. It may turn out to have issues not worth the hassle, but then again...... who knows?
Now, get off the computer and GO PLAY!
I just received my 1 m piezo cable from Digikey. Quite expensive but I was so intrigued I couldn't resist. I am interested in seeing how I could implement it into a DIY cymbal to provide really even and predictable triggering around the whole surface. I'm not sure how well-suited it will turn out to be for that task so if it doesn't work out I will use it as a rim trigger for my snare.
Mr_Bluesguy, maybe I am misreading your post, but it sounds like there is quite a lot of pressure on the piezo cable between the rim and hoop of the drum head. As in, the rim is tightened down on top of the piezo cable. Is that correct?
Also, how did you connect the cable to the terminals of the 1/4" jack/plug? The datasheet for the cable says it can be terminated using "standard coax splice techniques". I'm learning electronics through projects like this, so I'm not quite certain what that means. Google results show all kinds of crimp connectors etc. I was hoping to just solder the cable directly to the 1/4" plug leads if possible.
Last question...what bits would I be soldering? I assume the center core wire for one, but then is the other terminal to the piezo film itself, or the outer copper sheath?
Doug- I forgot to respond to your question about what I'm using for a hi-hat pedal. It's the Magnatrack REMEDY HC-2. I'm still evaluating it but like it so far. The cool thing is that it attaches under the pedal instead of under the hat cymbals.
Hey any tips for setting up the HC2 trigger with eDRUMIN? I'm using Super Drummer 3 with it. eDRUMIN module has a 2 zone and 3 zone cymbal choices but no hi-hat.
Thought I’d never find this thread. Thanks for sharing the thoughts, guys. Really appreciate that. I thought my request was too specific to find something on the web. As specific as Iron Age Accessories that my son asked for his birthday. Have you heard of them? He’s been playing an electric guitar for 2 years. A few days ago, he asked to find those accessories, but I had never heard of them. Luckily I have a friend who works at a guitar shop, so he helped me with a choice. Anyway, the guitar world is all about specific stuff. Best wishes to you, guys.
Last edited by BrayanStewart on Sat Sep 03, 2022 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The piezo cable I'm referring to appears to be a well kept secret. I can't believe that no one in the e-drum world has tried this, and I've done an exhaustive search for ANYTHING related to it. A few have tried various schemes using the the short lengths of guitar bridge piezo pickups, but that's about it. What I'm talking about is this:
You can buy it from DigiKey for about $35/meter. That's about 3 feet, so not horribly expensive, and almost the perfect length to go around a 14" drum. In the real world, it's typically used for traffic sensing. As such, it's extremely durable. Its construction is that of a co-ax cable, which means a flexible piezoelectric polymer plastic is wrapped around a center core of stranded flexible wire. This in turn is surrounded by standard braided shield seen on ordinary coax cables. The inner core and shield are the electrodes. The shield is akin to the black wire, the inner core to the red wire. What makes this cable different and incredibly useful is that it senses mostly impact (strike) stress and is relatively insensitive to vibrations. Of course being flexible it is easily formed into circles of almost any diameter. I have also successfully used it as a circumferential edge sensor on a low volume metal cymbal.
This is a great idea
Wondering how to wire this. Is the cable open ended and the jack is wired to opposite end?
Also interesting how the bell sensor was used not attached to the cymbal?
If mr-bluesguy is seeing this maybe a pic of wiring the cable and pic of the bell
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