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
