Millenium MPS-750

[anwe79]

Ok back to the MPS-750,
I've now set up most of the kit again from scratch, taking some notes during the process.
Attached is my setup at it's current state.

There are some things left I'd like to address;
First of all I haven't set up the Hi Hat controller.
This is mainly because I haven't decided how I'm going to hack it to make it into full swing proportional controller, so I haven't bothered yet.

Second, My "floor" tom is acting a bit weird, the dynamic range and "hotness" is very different from the other pads, even though they are all basically the same.
I'm not getting quite the dynamic range out of it that i would like, so I'm going to take it apart and check it for any mechanical/electrical issues.
Maybe it's just poor QC, I'm not sure.

Third, the snare is not quite perfect. It's pretty close, but I'm missing some of the lighter hits, possibly due to double triggering of the rim or something similar...

Fourth, I can't get chokes to work on the ride bow or bell notes. Since they work on the edge and both crashes, I'm thinking it may be a Superior Drummer issue, but not sure.
Not a big deal though.

Fifth, the Hi Hat pad could use some set up tweaking.
All the cymbals have a ring shaped piezo around the central hole, which is fine for the crashes and ride,
but for the Hi Hat it's a bit annoying, since the response varies a lot from the edge to the center, and makes it a bit fiddly to set the levels properly.

Rims on the mesh pads could also be tweaked a bit, but meh...

Overall I'm pretty happy though, and the feel is pretty good. I can do fairly convincing rolls (even though I'm only starting to learn those),
and for most pads I can let the stick bounce from a few centimeters, and pick up hits on all but the very faintest bounces.

I still have the odd spurious note here and there, since my thresholds are about as low as I could get away with, but it's easy to raise them a bit if i do get a false trigger.

I should probably add that I've aimed for as low thresholds/acoustic noise as possible, while still being able to get a decent range so I only get the max velocity when I really want it,
and not by accident.

The pad mapping is for the default Avatar kit in Superior Drummer 2.
I've put extra crashes on the crash edges, since I didn't feel the muted sounds where very useful, I can still choke manually or with the stick instead.

I'll get back when I've made some sense of my set-up notes and post the general procedure I've followed.

Edit: I forgot to add that I put the second crash on the tom 4 input.
/Andreas

[anwe79]

I have the Hi Hat controller sort of working in an on/off fashion now, without any hardware modding.
I cranked the trim pot on the underside (behind a sticker) all the way up.
This allows for some readings higher up in the travel, very slightly above the stopping rubber.
I set my high level slightly below what I get as max from auto levels,
and the low level to slightly higher than when I rest my foot lightly on the pedal.
The resulting range is very narrow, and I get some false chicks when I move my foot slightly,
so it's far from perfect, but at least I can control open/close with out having to really push on the pedal to close.

I will still do a hall effect hardware mod eventually, but for now it's good enough to play the kit and have some fun

I'll post some updated better settings tomorrow or this weekend.
I've got tom 3 and hat trigger working better as well, and some settings in the previous post must have gotten weird at some stage,
there were auto-levels left on and other strange stuff that should be fixed before I post new settings.

/Andreas

[airflamesred]

There's a couple where you have left the high level on - no big deal. I notice a retrigger of 1 somewhere, I can't 'out roll' 12ms!
What is the ride? Looks like a tough one.

[anwe79]

I think what happened is I have left some retriggers on 1 and played around with the dyn values instead, and then forgot going back to check it.

Yep the ride is a bit strange. I think there is a resistor with the wrong value in the internal divider by the pot, the PCB said 100k, but I think the value was actually 4,7k. I have some photos of the internals, will double check them.

I had to crank it it all the way up IIRC, both on the pot and the gain level.
Might be poor QC i guess, or they just decided to save a few cents on each board and go with two 4,7k instead of one of each.
Still works ok, and I get decent dynamics, so no real problem.

/Andreas

[airflamesred]

I had to crank it it all the way up IIRC, both on the pot and the gain level.
Might be poor QC i guess, or they just decided to save a few cents on each board and go with two 4,7k instead of one of each.
Still works ok, and I get decent dynamics, so no real problem.

/Andreas

I think if you are manufacturing a product, the last thing you want is for it to fail. It can work badly (your reputation/pricing may lead people believe it is good/the best) but it cannot fail because word gets around. I've digressed, I realise.

[anwe79]

Long time no see!

Sorry for that, I've had some distracting stuff going on in my life, but I'm back on track now.

Since my last post i decided to replace the pedals in my kit.
The Hi-hat controller was never going to work well as a continuous controller (the range is just at very bottom, and you had to press hard!)
without replacing the electronics.
While I could have done that and retrofitted a hall sensor (the mechanics should be pretty ok for that),
it was also pretty noisy acoustically, so I decided against it.

The kick pad assembly was also being a major problem, it was so noisy I could hear it over the kick sound in my headphones.
Even with sorbothane damping pads underneath and a floating podium.

I decided if i'm getting new pedals I want something pretty nice, so I splurged for a Roland FD-9 and KT-10.
I'm very happy with them so far, build quality is top notch, and with some minor tweaks the triggering is very good.

Onto the settings:

My previous failure to get the hat pedal working for CC turns out to be a misconfiguration in Carla (the VST host use in Linux).
I hadn't checked the "Send Control Changes" box in the VST parameters, DOH!
This took me several days to figure out, I checked that I had CC signal coming up to Superior with GMIDIMonitor, so I thought that was not the issue, sigh...

Anyway, I now have the full kit working, and the triggering is pretty damn good.
I don't think I've set up hat splashes yet, and the tom rims could use some sensitivity tweaking,
but the attached file is very playable and should be a good starting point for anyone with an MPS-750, MegaDrum and Superior Drummer.

This version of my settings is tailored for the FD-9 pedal, but the difference to the stock millenium pedal in the settings are probably pretty minor.
You may need to use a different input (HI vs LO Z) and curve, but I think the rest should be ok.
The kick will probably use different threshold/gain as well, but the kick is probably the easiest pad to set up anyway.

Note that the FD-9 requires a resistor across ring/tip to get good range, without it you will only get about a 50-60 value range, which is a bit too low for good feel.
I put my (10 or 12 K, don't remember which) resistor on a switch in the module, so I can switch it off just in case I swap pedals in the future.

The only other tweak I did was to remove one of the springs, and slightly bend the metal tongue on the FD-9 towards the sensor.
This makes for a better response in my opinion, where the pedal reacts higher up in the mechanical travel.

Over all I'm thrilled with the kit now.
There are surely more tweaking of the settings possible, but now I'm at a point where I can just sit down and play
and not be bothered with anything annoying in the response. I just enjoy it, it's very close to the feeling of real drums.

Next I'll try to tweak the transitions of the hat, there's something slightly out there, sort of studdering between openness levels.
Could be something to do with SD as well I guess.

Thank you Dmitri and everyone else involved in this awesome project, I love my MegaDrum now!

/Andreas

[PaulF707]

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread, but I am also interested in the MPS-750
I appreciate all your comments above about the HH pedal and it's interaction with the Megadrum, but did you test it at length (or at all) with the original module?
How does the MPS module interpret the HH pedal - is it a simple open/closed switch or was it progressive (or even open/half/closed)?
Do you know what the midi output from the module was for the HH - was it simply sending different midi notes (depending on pedal position), or was it transmitting Midi CC information from the pedal position?

Any info you may have would be helpful (I've tried emailing Thomann, but their response was 'Normally your DAW will recognize the hihat controller as a footcontroller automatically.' - I guess they didn't understand my question)

I've noticed that Thomann have a newer model coming (MPS-850):
https://www.thomann.de/gb/millenium_mps ... 0118759b43
Probably not for me as I want a separate hihat pad and pedal, but the rest of the kit looks quite good....

Thanks
Paul

[fubbik]

how and where do you connect the separate cable from crash 2? I need a splitter