I have been doing a few posts about things I have been making with my 3D printer (Bambu Lab A1). One that I had been keen to do was to make some drum triggers. These are devices that attach to a conventional drum kit and allow you to fire off audio samples when you hit the drum with dynamics that can depend on how hard you hit it. You can buy such items for around £50 to £100 and that seems a lot when you consider that they are basically a piezoelectric sensor that costs pennies in a housing with a socket to connect it to the drum system. Those housings can be metal or plastic and I have this device that can print off plastic items.
I was planning to use the triggers with my Yamaha EAD10. This uses a small unit with a couple of microphones to record the whole kit rather than having one on each drum. It actually does that quite well. It also has a trigger built in that should pick up the bass drum, but it is known to not work with all drums and mine is one that it does not like.
The EAD10 can add effects to the audio and you can add multiple triggers that can use the many built in samples or those you load into it. The unit can also record audio to a USB drive or send it to a computer. It is a very versatile and powerful piece of kit.
I did not design these trigger housings myself. I found them on Thingiverse where people share items they created. I had to load them into the Bambu Lab software to print them and that took just a few hours. The plastic used would only cost a couple of pounds. The other parts I needed were the piezo sensors, 1/4" sockets, some nuts and bolts, and some foam. I ordered the foam on ebay and it is specially designed for this purpose. It came from China and cost about £1 for each piece. So the total cost of each trigger was a fraction of what you would normally pay. You need to do some simple soldering to connect things up.
There were some challenges along the way. The nuts and bolts are used to clamp the triggers onto the drums and the holes for the nuts were a little small. I was able to glue one of them in place, but for the other I used a soldering iron to heat it up so that I could push it into the plastic.
In the video you should be able to hear that my bass drum has an added timbale sound and the floor tom has a tamborine. In real use you might be more likely to mix in the sound of a similar drum to get a better sound. My bass drum is quite small, but I could use this to make it sound bigger. A lot of drummers use this technology to tweak their sound.
Getting the triggers set up was a little tricky. The EAD10 has various settings for sensitivity, gain, crosstalk and dynamic curve. I do wonder if the sensors will vary a little as one seems more sensitive than the other. I can experiment more with that. I may make some more triggers for the rest of the kit and I can tweak some aspects of the design.
On another front I have been learning more about the Kdenlive video editing software. I had to combine video from my phone with audio from the EAD10. I have now learned how to fade those in and out.
Rock on!
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That’s a really awesome application for 3D printers. I’ve never liked the feel of electronic drumsets (Roland). Don’t get me wrong, better than nothing, but it’s not healthy. A musician loses their perception of dynamic control if they only play on electric drum set. What you have is a wonderful compromise. It might be a little bit more loud, but if you’re just doing solo recording projects, it’s all good. Live stuff it’s probably super awesome. You don’t have to play loud and the sound man can make adjustments to the house mix.
My Roland kit is pretty good, but it is different to the acoustic kit. I'm lucky to have both, but I can't play loud unless I'm home alone. We don't have close neighbours. This gives me more opinions.
Well said, it’s funny how much a home environment can affect a musicians practice ability. I once lived in a loud neighborhood and I felt like I had free rain to play drums anytime I wanted. I actually played along with the music the neighbors were playing.
Yeah, awesome to have both.
Cool i guess you could use all kinds of samples in the end for it .
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I'm also getting back into 3D printing and have restored and upgraded my old Ender 3 Pro with direct drive, accelerometer and more.
Still getting the setting right, though.
Hope that goes well. I'm happy with mine.
That's pretty cool. You really have me thinking I need to upgrade my 3D printer here at work now.
I'm always amazed on what you can do with that 3d printer, I wonder why it doesn't spread more around
They are pretty cheap now and easy to use.
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