Problem with dual piezo management and hihat controller

[elrules]

Hi dmitri, after using megadrum some days. I have managed to configure it the right way and perform correctly.

But I still have two problems related with how the firmware manages two things:

Dual piezo pads
I think I have found a bug with dual piezo management. I have dual piezo mesh head toms ans snare. When I hit the mesh, only the "Head" VU meter goes up. When I hit the mesh hardly some times (randomly) both meters (head and rim) goes up and sometimes I get a rim sound instead of a mesh sound. The same occurs the other way round. When I hit the rim and not only with hard hits, also with medium-strength hits, some hits make both VU meters go up so the triggering is a bit messy. And my question is this: if a pad is set dual head, that means that when you hit the pad only one sound must trigger, so how is it possible that both meters go up at the same time?

Hihat controller
Problem 1
I use a Roland VH-11 hihat. It has a variable 20k resistor. I don't know if it is a logarithmic or linear pot. I have realized that when I progressively step the pedal down, the VU meter decreases smoothly as I step the pedal, but after half of the VU meter (when I have the pedal pressed half its way) then the range from half to completely closed is very quickly. I mean, while keeping the same "stepping" speed, the VU meter is not decreasing smoothly, it decreases very quickly to minimum. Due to this, when playing, the feeling is not real because between closed and half closed the change is abrupt and not linear as with halfopen to full open. How does megadrum manage hihat controller? Does it take into account that the pot can be logarithmic? If it only sees it as a linear pot I think that is the problem. Will then be possible to let the user set the kind of pot he uses (linear or logarithmic)? I am not sure but maybe the VH-11 is logarithmic, and the pot I bought for making a second DIY pedal is also that way, so maybe the log pots are more common than linear one. Please let me know what you think about all of this.

Problem 2
Some time ago we talked about pedal chick and splash pedal notes. That day I just talked from suppositions. Now that I have tested megadrum with Addictive drums I can say that your aproach to pedal chick/splash is not completely correct. When I perform a foot splash (stepping and releasing the pedal quickly, as I would do in an acoustic hat) I get in the sampler the chick, and immediately afterwards the splash. That sounds very bad to me. I remember when using the TD6 as a tirgger-to-midi, only one note played at a time. If I did the foot splash only the splash note/sound triggered/sounded. Could you try releasing a firmware with this change to see the effect on normal playing techniques?

Thanks for reading this huge post about possible bugs. Hope this can improve megadrum

[dmitri]

Hi dmitri, after using megadrum some days. I have managed to configure it the right way and perform correctly.

But I still have two problems related with how the firmware manages two things:

Dual piezo pads
I think I have found a bug with dual piezo management. I have dual piezo mesh head toms ans snare. When I hit the mesh, only the "Head" VU meter goes up. When I hit the mesh hardly some times (randomly) both meters (head and rim) goes up and sometimes I get a rim sound instead of a mesh sound. The same occurs the other way round. When I hit the rim and not only with hard hits, also with medium-strength hits, some hits make both VU meters go up so the triggering is a bit messy. And my question is this: if a pad is set dual head, that means that when you hit the pad only one sound must trigger, so how is it possible that both meters go up at the same time?

It may be very dependant on two things:
1. Physical contraction of a dual piezo/piezo pad
2. Settings you've set for both head and rim.
With a bad combination of these two you may get the behaviour you saw. I won't go into detail but with a certain Threshold/Retrigger/DynLevel/DynTime combination on both channels this may happen because signals over Threshold (including Dynamic threshold) may be registered as if coming at different times. First of all, can you list the settings you have for your piezo/piezo pad?

Hihat controller
Problem 1
I use a Roland VH-11 hihat. It has a variable 20k resistor. I don't know if it is a logarithmic or linear pot. I have realized that when I progressively step the pedal down, the VU meter decreases smoothly as I step the pedal, but after half of the VU meter (when I have the pedal pressed half its way) then the range from half to completely closed is very quickly. I mean, while keeping the same "stepping" speed, the VU meter is not decreasing smoothly, it decreases very quickly to minimum. Due to this, when playing, the feeling is not real because between closed and half closed the change is abrupt and not linear as with halfopen to full open. How does megadrum manage hihat controller? Does it take into account that the pot can be logarithmic? If it only sees it as a linear pot I think that is the problem. Will then be possible to let the user set the kind of pot he uses (linear or logarithmic)? I am not sure but maybe the VH-11 is logarithmic, and the pot I bought for making a second DIY pedal is also that way, so maybe the log pots are more common than linear one. Please let me know what you think about all of this.

I may agree with you on that since I don't have a wide selection of pedals to test it with. What I can do is to add 'Curves' for the pedal.

Problem 2
Some time ago we talked about pedal chick and splash pedal notes. That day I just talked from suppositions. Now that I have tested megadrum with Addictive drums I can say that your aproach to pedal chick/splash is not completely correct. When I perform a foot splash (stepping and releasing the pedal quickly, as I would do in an acoustic hat) I get in the sampler the chick, and immediately afterwards the splash. That sounds very bad to me. I remember when using the TD6 as a tirgger-to-midi, only one note played at a time. If I did the foot splash only the splash note/sound triggered/sounded. Could you try releasing a firmware with this change to see the effect on normal playing techniques?

I'm not yet persuaded. Suppose you do a chick. You don't want any delays between you hit a bottom with a pedal and a moment you hear sound. Now with your approach if I want to hear only either a chick or a splash I will have to delay sending a chick signal for certain period of time to make sure that a splash doesn't follow a chick. And this delay will be noticeable. Don't you agree?
Anyone else has a view on this?

Thanks for reading this huge post about possible bugs. Hope this can improve megadrum

[dmitri]

Dual piezo pads
I think I have found a bug with dual piezo management. I have dual piezo mesh head toms ans snare. When I hit the mesh, only the "Head" VU meter goes up. When I hit the mesh hardly some times (randomly) both meters (head and rim) goes up and sometimes I get a rim sound instead of a mesh sound. The same occurs the other way round. When I hit the rim and not only with hard hits, also with medium-strength hits, some hits make both VU meters go up so the triggering is a bit messy. And my question is this: if a pad is set dual head, that means that when you hit the pad only one sound must trigger, so how is it possible that both meters go up at the same time?

It may be very dependant on two things:
1. Physical contraction of a dual piezo/piezo pad
2. Settings you've set for both head and rim.
With a bad combination of these two you may get the behaviour you saw. I won't go into detail but with a certain Threshold/Retrigger/DynLevel/DynTime combination on both channels this may happen because signals over Threshold (including Dynamic threshold) may be registered as if coming at different times. First of all, can you list the settings you have for your piezo/piezo pad?

I forgot MinScan which, when set incorrectly for both channels, may also lead to this behaviour.

[elrules]

I'm not yet persuaded. Suppose you do a chick. You don't want any delays between you hit a bottom with a pedal and a moment you hear sound. Now with your approach if I want to hear only either a chick or a splash I will have to delay sending a chick signal for certain period of time to make sure that a splash doesn't follow a chick. And this delay will be noticeable. Don't you agree?
Anyone else has a view on this?

That is the reason why performing a splash sound in a roland module is a bit tricky. If you want to trigger a splash sound in a roland module, you have to step-leave pedal quite quickly, you have to do a quick movement in which the pedal reach CC=0 and then increase CC by some X value.

Well, I think the behavior is yet implemented, if you step the pedal down (reach CC=0) and then after a certain time (miliseconds maybe?) you don't step up the pedal it triggers a chick, but if it reaches a CC value over threshold, then it must trigger the splash. The thing with the roland modules is that the splash must be quick to have it triggered, else you have a chick sound.

Could the splash delay time and threshold be configurable?

About the dualhead pads, I will post my config latter. But it is quite near the default values

[dmitri]

I'm not yet persuaded. Suppose you do a chick. You don't want any delays between you hit a bottom with a pedal and a moment you hear sound. Now with your approach if I want to hear only either a chick or a splash I will have to delay sending a chick signal for certain period of time to make sure that a splash doesn't follow a chick. And this delay will be noticeable. Don't you agree?
Anyone else has a view on this?

That is the reason why performing a splash sound in a roland module is a bit tricky. If you want to trigger a splash sound in a roland module, you have to step-leave pedal quite quickly, you have to do a quick movement in which the pedal reach CC=0 and then increase CC by some X value.

Well, I think the behavior is yet implemented, if you step the pedal down (reach CC=0) and then after a certain time (miliseconds maybe?) you don't step up the pedal it triggers a chick, but if it reaches a CC value over threshold, then it must trigger the splash. The thing with the roland modules is that the splash must be quick to have it triggered, else you have a chick sound.

Could the splash delay time and threshold be configurable?

You made me think and I'm sure I'll come up with something.

[elrules]

DualHead toms
Settings for both Tom1H and Tom1R (in fact I have set all my inputs with the same values):
Curve: Log1
ComprLevel: 0
LevelShift: 0
Xtalk: 2
XtalkGroup: 0
Threshold: 20
Gain: 0
HighAuto: No
HighLevel: 1023
Retrigger: 6
DynLevel: 1
DynTime: 64
MinScan: 20

DualHead=Yes, Type=Piezo

I finished setting DynLevel and Dyntime to those values as I discovered my "multitrigger" problem with the snare (posted in another thread) was solved

Hihat controller problem 1
I have now tested megadrum with Toontrack Superior 2.0. The hihat open-to-close range works great. It seems that hihat performance is quite influenced by which sampler you use. For that it would be nice to have that you mentioned: curves for the hihat controller. Then you could counteract the effects of a logarithmic pot with an exponential curve (is that right?? ) The other way would be to wait for edrum monitor to do this for us, but the disadvantage would be the need of an aditional software.

[dmitri]

elrules, try this version:

megadrum32_20080918.zip

It adds two settings in the 'HiHat Pedal' section:
1. Curve
2. ChckDelay

With the first setting you can counteract logarithmic HiHat pedal output.
With the second setting you can assign chick delay in milliseconds. With a default value 0 Chick/Splash behaviour is just like in previous firmware versions. When I set it to 20 I can avoid a chick with a splash and still have not badly noticeable chick delays but I must press/release a pedal really fast. When set to 50 chick delays become very noticeable although getting splash without a chick is much easier.

Note: Previously saved EEPROM and SysEx configs are not compatible with this version so if upgrading with a bootloader either set 'AuloadConf' to No before the upgrade or load default settings after the upgrade (holding key RIGHT while powering up).

[CairnsFella]

Hi dmitri, after using megadrum some days. I have managed to configure it the right way and perform correctly.

But I still have two problems related with how the firmware manages two things:

Dual piezo pads
I think I have found a bug with dual piezo management. I have dual piezo mesh head toms ans snare. When I hit the mesh, only the "Head" VU meter goes up. When I hit the mesh hardly some times (randomly) both meters (head and rim) goes up and sometimes I get a rim sound instead of a mesh sound. The same occurs the other way round. When I hit the rim and not only with hard hits, also with medium-strength hits, some hits make both VU meters go up so the triggering is a bit messy. And my question is this: if a pad is set dual head, that means that when you hit the pad only one sound must trigger, so how is it possible that both meters go up at the same time?

I think this may be related to the issue I am having with my home made pads.

If it is possible to give at least a starting point for the settings which effect this problem it may help resolve the problem. I understand that each setup will vary, but a pointer OR suggested set up could do not harm... pleeeaaaaasssssseee

[dmitri]

DualHead toms
Settings for both Tom1H and Tom1R (in fact I have set all my inputs with the same values):
Curve: Log1
ComprLevel: 0
LevelShift: 0
Xtalk: 2
XtalkGroup: 0
Threshold: 20
Gain: 0
HighAuto: No
HighLevel: 1023
Retrigger: 6
DynLevel: 1
DynTime: 64
MinScan: 20

DualHead=Yes, Type=Piezo

Is your MegaDrum with 74HC4851 multiplexers? If yes, than in first place your thresholds seems to be too low (MegaDrum with 74HC4851 is more sensitive). Without knowing how your pad is built, I would suggest to set Thresholds for Rims 20-50 higher than for Heads.
My test MegaDrum is built with 4051 multiplexers. I have a Pintech snare and set Threshold 20 for Head and 50 for Rim and triggering on this pad seems to be perfect.

[CairnsFella]

D'oh.. I somehow missed the settings already posted

Sorry for being so stupid..... again