Bezier velocity curve

[thenewdrummer]

You have to make sure that your drums are up to proper levels in EZDrummer (or SD3, or wherever) first. So load up a loop, something with nice dynamics, and adjust levels until everything sounds the way you want.

Then, adjust your settings on the eDRUMin, making sure you get the most dynamic range out of a pad. In the bottom right of the Curves panel, you can see the velocities it sends out. Ideally this goes from near zero on your softer hits all the way up to 127 when you whack it real hard. I've found that most pads don't respond quite linearly though, so the curve I use boosts the softer velocities until it sounds more natural to me.

Screenshot of my snare pad settings (just as a reference for the above, it's quite likely that your pad responds very differently.)

Screen Shot 2020-09-21 at 5.20.28 PM.png

Thanks a lot. Having a curve that's look like yours really improved the response of my pad.

It's still not perfect, so I'll need to tweak it a little bit, but it sounds a lot better now.

Note: Yes playing a loop in ezdrummer2 already did sound great.

[lalo]

I just calibrate manually, it gives me more control

[thenewdrummer]

I just calibrate manually, it gives me more control

Yes I would do that, but even after reading the manual, I don't understand what control do what.

I know that gain will affect gains and how to change it, but the meaning of each is still a little bit obscure for me (scan, thresh, hold, decay...)

[monospace]

Rob made an instruction video a couple of months ago that explains setting up a mesh pad really well:
https://youtu.be/4sacaCU19oE

What I sometimes do when I don’t understand a specific control is make some really extreme adjustments, just to get a feel for what it does, then go back and tweak it around the default settings, which are pretty good starting points in general on the eDrumIn.

[thenewdrummer]

Rob made an instruction video a couple of months ago that explains setting up a mesh pad really well:
https://youtu.be/4sacaCU19oE

What I sometimes do when I don’t understand a specific control is make some really extreme adjustments, just to get a feel for what it does, then go back and tweak it around the default settings, which are pretty good starting points in general on the eDrumIn.

Yes I watch it already a couple of time, but it still really high level. There's no details on what each control will do and what we want to achieve with each.

[thenewdrummer]

Rob made an instruction video a couple of months ago that explains setting up a mesh pad really well:
https://youtu.be/4sacaCU19oE

What I sometimes do when I don’t understand a specific control is make some really extreme adjustments, just to get a feel for what it does, then go back and tweak it around the default settings, which are pretty good starting points in general on the eDrumIn.

I think one of my main problem is that I don't know what a transient is and it's not really explained in the doc.

I googled it, and I'm starting to understand it better but not 100%.

What I found so far: https://www.waves.com/drum-transients-shaping-tips

[monospace]

A transient is simply the initial burst of energy in a waveform. Remember that when you hit a drum pad with a piezo, you create a waveform too. It's not a sound wave, but it's still a "wave" of voltage — and what Rob's code is doing is analyzing that voltage waveform to create a (MIDI) signal that your drum software can use to play its samples.

The difficulty with doing this is that every time you hit your trigger, there's not just the transient (the "hit") but a lot of other information that can either be used (for example to determine how far away from the piezo you hit: positional sensing) or that needs to be discarded, such as rebounds from your sticks, or the residual vibrations from your meshhead.

So that's what you're doing in the eDRUMin control app: tell the software where the useful bits of the waveform are that you generate. There's no simple one-size-fits-all setting. It depends on your pads, your playing style, etc. If your Scan is too short, positional sensing or hot spot suppression might be affected. If your Hold is too long, you might get double triggers. If your Decay is too short, you might get dropouts in your buzzrolls.

What's fantastic about the eDRUMin is that all of this is under your fingertips. But it's going to take a bit of time and experimentation to figure out what the best settings are for your specific setup.

[thenewdrummer]

A transient is simply the initial burst of energy in a waveform. Remember that when you hit a drum pad with a piezo, you create a waveform too. It's not a sound wave, but it's still a "wave" of voltage — and what Rob's code is doing is analyzing that voltage waveform to create a (MIDI) signal that your drum software can use to play its samples.

The difficulty with doing this is that every time you hit your trigger, there's not just the transient (the "hit") but a lot of other information that can either be used (for example to determine how far away from the piezo you hit: positional sensing) or that needs to be discarded, such as rebounds from your sticks, or the residual vibrations from your meshhead.

So that's what you're doing in the eDRUMin control app: tell the software where the useful bits of the waveform are that you generate. There's no simple one-size-fits-all setting. It depends on your pads, your playing style, etc. If your Scan is too short, positional sensing or hot spot suppression might be affected. If your Hold is too long, you might get double triggers. If your Decay is too short, you might get dropouts in your buzzrolls.

What's fantastic about the eDRUMin is that all of this is under your fingertips. But it's going to take a bit of time and experimentation to figure out what the best settings are for your specific setup.

Thanks a lot for the information. Very informative.
Tomorrow, I'll do like you told, play with each setting to try to understand what hold, decay and scan does.

[Mylo]

The scan, hold, and decay is all about the balancing act of getting accurate velocity and drum rolls and buzz roll without double triggering.

The way I understand it is when you hit an edrum the piezo is excited akin to a bowling bowl dropped on a trampoline. It takes few milliseconds for it to go from fully excited to calm back down to 0 voltage thus creating a transient. The first 2-3ms of the hit is very strong and then it fades out like an acoustic waveform discussed in the article you posted. This all happens within a 100ms of the initial hit.

You can apply the terms attack, sustain, decay, release to a transient from a piezo but that’s not what the eDRUMin is after. It just wants to know which part of the transient to use to generate velocity and which part it can ignore to avoid double triggers.

When I had the MegaDrum it took me a while to get my 14” floor tom to stop double triggering. I hit it and BOOM, BOOM. I finally found the right combination and got it working. Course now I have the eDRUMin and double triggering seems to be long in my past.

[Rob]

The manual, I feel, does a good job of explaining these controls.

You want the scan time to be short. A MIDI note is generated after scan phase and you want that note to be generated as quickly as possible. The problem with doing that is that higher intensity peeks often come later in the transient around 10ms and we don't want them to trigger a second note, so we have a hold phase where the device continues to look for the maximum intensity of the transient.

After the hold phase, the device uses the maximum intensity it measured to produce a decay curve. Any peeks that are below that curve will be ignored and any that are above it will start the scan process over again.

So with the decay, you want to adjust it to make sure it completely covers the rest of the transient to prevent double triggering.

I hope that helps.

Rob