I have here: my best efforts at my crudely drawn MS Paint diagram of my mental idea for a pad.
I have to make somewhere around 17 of these, + a load of slightly different ones for cymbals, and chances are I will have to order the parts for all in one, so no chance to actually prototype, so I want to make sure the design is okay before I send off for the parts.
Basically the pads are screwed with that bracket thing directly to the pipe, which is 15mm hard copper (well it felt hard enough in the DIY store ). They will be connected as a 'rack' rather than each pad on a seperate stand. Could this cause a problem with crosstalk? Or would the foam suppress this enough? I tried to design it so that the playing surface, piezo and drum frame were as mechanically seperated as possible.
The piezo is stuck to some kind of material sandwiched in the foam and not in direct contact with either surface of the pad, in order to reduce the 'hotspot', would this work? Again, the idea being that the foam provides some mechanical 'insulation' between the piezo + pad, so to reduce hotspot, and also between pad + frame, to reduce crosstalk?
And my final idea, instead of running an individual ground wire to each pad, is there any reason why I can't just attach the main drum frame to ground, and ground the pads that way, instead of running 32 individual ground wires to each pad? Could save a lot of soldering and cabling!
Any comments/thoughts/criticisms/"you are a moron, do this instead"s welcome!
And PS. Although you can't see it in the diagram, the foam bits are actually foam discs, 4 in each pad, one at the top, one left, one right, one bottom, at the edge of the pad: