Configuration of Megadrum

[sbonasuk]

I started this project for three reasons 1. Quiet drums so I could play at night time 2. The fun of building an edrum set and 3. The cost of edrums they can cost thousands of pounds.

My drum instruction kit is a Roland and I do not like playing it, the rubber cymbals, marmalade has more rebound, however that poor response does improve my stick control when I play my own set.

My Snare and Toms are home made with the piezo foam cone and metal bracketry system (There is a post with pictures), the cymbals were diy acrylic heat/vacuum formed, although now I have used real cymbals deadened with the lead bitumen coating strip used for roofs,why? they look good dynamics are brilliant and easy to convert. I will post a how-to with pictures soon.

I use AD2 perfect, and of course megadrum. USB connection through a SCARLETT SOLO, excellent for the latency.

I did buy a Yamaha 155 and 135 hi hat but found the dynamics lacking especially on the HI HAT. My own hi hat is the brass cymbals they look standard and the control is through a sliding potentiometer attached to the pedal

Set up is a bit of a fiddle but this helped so much

I found this on another forum written by our esteemed colleague Ignotus whom I trust will not mind me re-posting it here:

Make sure you have "Autoload Conf" set to 'yes' (and save the config); it's at the start of the menu. This will make sure the module loads up the last saved configuration. Don't panic. Take it one pad at a time (don't try to do several at the same time), get the hang of it, and then move on to other similar pads - e.g. do the snare and then move on to the toms; then do a cymbal, followed by the rest. Also, don't just dial in settings randomly without knowing what you're doing, you'll drive yourself insane.

(Here you have several posts explaining how to set up a few different types of pads: view...php?f=3&t=1968)

editors note please read the other posts in the forum about cooling "HOT PADS" this is important

The (slightly different) way I go about setting a mesh pad is this:

1.- Set HighLevel Auto to 'yes' and whack the pad hard 10 times. Look at the number you get in 'HighLevel'. If it's between 500 and 1000 move to step 2. If it's below 500, raise gain and repeat the process. If it's above 1000, reduce gain and repeat the process. Ideally it should be around 800-900 but if it's at around 500 it's still fine.

2.- Reduce Threshold until the pad starts auto-triggering. Raise it by 2.

3.- Set Retrigger to 1 and Dyntime and Dynlevel to 0. You'll probably get loads of double triggers. Raise Dyntime to 24 and then raise Dynlevel one number at a time until double triggers go away. Don't go higher than 4 or 5 (I find it starts missing hits if higher than 5, YMMV). If you still get double triggering start raising Retrigger until they go away.
The pad should now be triggering fairly decently. Fine-tuning involves tweaking the above parameters, there's not much else to it apart from choosing a curve that suits the dynamics you want.

Thanks again ignotus

Happy playing

[ignotus]

Glad you found the info useful - no problem at all to repost it anywhere

I have a question for you:

You mention that you get great latency with the Scarlett Solo. Is that the new, 2nd gen. version or the old one? What frequency rate and frames/period values can you get with it? I've been eyeing the Scarlett range of USB interfaces but I'd like to know if I could push latency down further than with my onboard sound card (Soundblaster; 64 frames @ 48 kHz) before buying one.

Cheers!

[sbonasuk]

Its a Scarlett Solo about two years old, however I think its 2nd gen, I run it at 96 kHz with 256 samples It more than halved the latency rate of my sound card around two half ms, a professional drummer who also mixes and records after playing suggested he could not detect any real latency.

One for you do you ever bother with minscan and do you use a standard curve one for cymbals and one for pads

Ta

[ignotus]

Nah, the 2nd gen series only came out a few months ago, so you'll have the 1st gen. 256 @ 96 kHz is more latency than what I'm currently getting so I wouldn't be making any gains in that department... Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of those people who thinks they can detect minute increases in ms; I'm just looking for a sound card that has its own headphone gain control (instead of having to fiddle with the mouse), and good sound quality, but while I'm at it, I'd like to achieve at least the same latency, or if possible, less. Linux does a good job of squeezing out all the performance the onboard sound can deliver, but I guess USB has its limitations. Thanks for the info though.

I have minscan at about 20 - 30, depending on the pad, and I use log curves, mostly log2 or log3, on all pads.

[sbonasuk]

You prompted to speak to Focusrite to ask what the difference is between the 1st and 2nd gen and primarily its latency, however there is a new driver which when installed give the 1st gen similar performance , I now run at 32 frames at 96 mhz with a latency shown as 0.3ms.

[ignotus]

That's cool that you asked. Ok, so it looks like the main differences as far as latency is concerned are in the drivers rather than in the hardware, so if I'm using Linux it probably wouldn't make much of a difference. Damn, when the 2nd gen came out there were massive discounts on the 1st gen (they were selling the Solo for like €55) as they got rid of them to make way for the new ones... now they're all gone.

[sbonasuk]

I don't believe there is a Linux driver or not one I can see on the focusrite website, took this directly from it:


"This applies to All Focusrite Products

None of our products are supported for use on Linux.

The Scarlett range and iTrack Solo are Class Compliant USB Devices, and may work in a Linux-based setup that support this class of device, but we do not offer support for doing this and cannot verify the performance you may experience.

For a list of Mac and PC Operating Systems supported for your device, please check out our OS Compatibility page here"

[ignotus]

Yeah, actually I don't think any manufacturers provide Linux drivers, but if a USB device is class-compliant it should work - the OS provides its own drivers, which I think is the case with Macs too. I've found Linux users who report that that it works so no worries there. I've been doing some research and it seems that there have actually been improvements in the device itself that improve latency, aside from drivers, so I might go for one.