www.megadrum.info

I want to share my experience with Megadrum and give some opinions on it.
Before I own a Megadrum I had a TD-6 module based crossbar-cone-mesh drum setup, it was alright, but I wanted to expand my kit and hope to have perfect control over each of my drum and cymbal pads. I trigger sounds from VST so all I needed was the midi data, that's when I came across Megadrum, a perfect solution to me, so immediately I bought a 32-input completed box from dmitri and had it shipped to me in Hong Kong.

Although I must admit that I have only spent about a month or so with Megadrum, I have became an edrum enthusiast over the summer and spent half my time browsing vdrums and megadrum forums, learning and testing different approaches to getting the best edrumming experience. After spending a long time with the megadrum manual and tweaking the settings, installing voltage dividers, changing many mesh heads, and making changes to my drum triggering design, I have come into a conclusion to my megadrum experience: The trigger signal handling in megadrum is never as accurate as Roland modules'. (I'm really sorry to say this)

For 99% of my time I only plugged in the snare drum and focus on just its head triggering, I wanted to make it perfect before moving on. But no matter how hard I tried adjusting the Threshold, Gain, HighLevel, Retrigger, DynLevel/Time, MinScan, it still either double triggers on single hits or misses notes in fast rolls, also very light hits on the side are not detected(no signal light blinking) even when threshold is tuned to minimum. After long hours of tweaking and not getting satisfactory results, I plugged it into my TD-6, and BAM it works perfectly.

I think the long years and much money spent on developing the Roland triggering system has really proven itself to have the perfect algorithm for converting piezo signals to accurate midi signals, no double triggering caused by mesh head vibrations, and no missed notes on even the tightest buzz roll, and detects very light hits on the side of the mesh head very well.

To me the only aspect that the roland module is better than megadrum is its signal handling algorithm(same reason why TMC-6 is always better than the Alesis trigger IO), but it is this difference which would lead me to return to the TD-6 again. If there is a setting in megadrum which could get me the same good result I would not mind spending another 100 hour to get it, but I think the limitation of megadrum is at its core signal handling. If some day dmitri works out a comparable, or better, triggering algorithm as the Roland's, I would be more than happy to return to Megadrum again. But for now, Roland's my choice.

Thank you dmitri for your great creation, I truly love the idea and the amount of effort put into it, I hope Megadrum will get better and better overtime!

UPDATE: I have fixed most of my problems by simply replacing the 100k voltage divider with a 50k pot. Thanks everyone, Megadrum is awesome

MD indeed is hard to nail it, but did you try this route: viewtopic.php?p=20543#p20543 ?

Jackiecorn, i have been looking on your 9 posts...but i can not figure out what kind of triggers you are using. Vh-11 for hihat and Yamaha cymbal triggers...but what kind of drumtriggers do you use? I have also a Td-6...but I do think my Megadrum is better. (yes...i have spent some more time to get famililar and configuring the MD...) upload your MDS file...and let us try to help you!!

Anders

My drums are simple aluminum cross-bar setup with quartz cones in the center of the drum, I use drum-tec design mesh heads, on all of my 10",12",13"(snare),14" drums.
Currently I use VH-11 as my hi hat but I am considering making my own hi hat with real cymbals and HQ soundoff mutes, controlled by a to-build hall effect sensor, but this is another story.
For crashes I am currently using roland CY-8, but I am switching to my diy cymbals soon, which are real cymbals fitted with a rubber edge much like the fuel line used as rubber rims. I only hit the edges of my crashes and I only need single zone, no switch.
I don't have a proper ride cymbal pad right now but I am looking into the same approach as my hihat+soundoff mute solution.But all these are things to be worried later.
I don't use any yamaha pads, don't know where you got that from.
I would love to get help from others and hopefully sort it out like angr77 did, but I couldn't get MDM to work properly on my mac so I can't export my MDS file.


As I have mentioned, for now I only want to get my mesh head snare drum to work perfectly first before moving on. Here are some questions I want to ask:
1. I have installed a voltage divider with 2 100k resistors, so the signal is essentially cut by half. Does the high value resistors matter or is it only the ratio of the two resistors that determines how much the signal is cooled?
2. I believe the level of signal that goes into the megadrum plays a large role in the output result, so what is a "good level" for megadrum to process?
3. When I hit lightly on the side of my snare, plugged into my TD-6, I get very nice response for every hit I make. But when I do that with megadrum, even with high gain and minimum threshold, I still couldn't get those light side hits detected.
4. When I do fast buzz rolls or even doubles, not all hits are detected, even with threshold set to minimum, retrigger set to minimum, and no dynLevel/Time. While on the roland it's perfect.
5. Double triggering occurs pretty often, I can of course get rid of it with threshold/retrigger/dynlevel/time, but that would make fast rolls worse anyway.
6. Does the size of my piezos matter if I already have my hot pad cooled? I use 35mm piezo under a quartz cone.
7. Does the Gain value increases the signal analogly or digitally? I mean is there a difference between a "cool" signal with high Gain value and a "hot" signal with low Gain value? If so, which one is better?
8. Can you explain the exactly science behind DynLevel and DynTime?
9. I can plug my trigger cable to an audio interface and get waveform data from hitting in different levels, which is the purest form of the signal that gets processed, can we get some discussion focusing on how megadrum processes this signal and how each setting affects the "resultant data"? If we could dig deep down into the signal processing we could think of ways to improve accuracy of triggering.

Sorry these are only some of the questions I want to get answered, I would be happy to get back into megadrum if the answers would inspire me to tweak my settings better.
Thanks.

200k seems way too much to me ... Are you sure you needed 200k?

jackiecorn, I'm really sorry you're having problems! I'd like to help as much as I could but for anyone browsing the forum the name of the topic is telling that you've made up your mind about MegaDrum pretty much without giving me a chance to help you. I guess you will understand me.

everson wrote:200k seems way too much to me ... Are you sure you needed 200k?

I'm not sure if it matters, as the output voltage is determined by only the ratio of the two resistors: A/(A+B), so in my case, two identical resistors make a 1/2 voltage drop.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

dmitri wrote:jackiecorn, I'm really sorry you're having problems! I'd like to help as much as I could but for anyone browsing the forum the name of the topic is telling that you've made up your mind about MegaDrum pretty much without giving me a chance to help you. I guess you will understand me.

Yes I understand that, it almost makes it sound like megadrum is a bad product, it is not! I have changed the topic name to make things easier for all of us.
Since I have become so serious in megadrum and edrumming development in general, I hope I can contribute to the project by knowing the details of the science behind triggering and hope to think of ways to improve it for everyone if possible. Your answers to my question would be a great start!

Good info from everson and angr77.
Most Alesis products are at the budget end of the market. Roland covers the higher end. As far as trigger interfaces go the megadrum is the best I have come across, and I'm only using rubber pads. I know everson and angr77 use mesh heads so it is configurable.
Ask questions rather than dismissing. Post your problems, that's how products get developed.
regards
Mark

To start with, forget about the rim for now. It's probably even better to disable it by setting its Note to 0 to avoid interference with the head.
1. How did you set the HighLevel?
2. After you've configured the HighLevel did you follow the steps from http://www.megadrum.info/forums/viewtop ... 543#p20543 (as everson suggested) to configure the mesh head?