My DIY e-drum: 10 years of hard lessons

Paolo Pustorino
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read

Disclaimer: this post is a long and pedantic diary page about my (quasi-failed) attempts to build a solid DIY e-drum kit. I wrote it as an introduction to my other post My DIY e-drum: real-feel kick but it grew out of control. :D
I removed the blurb from the other post but decided to leave it here in the hope others can avoid my mistakes. For more practical information, head to the other post… for all others, take it or leave it: your choice.

Why this post?

All began twelve years ago when I discovered how to craft a DIY e-drum. At that time it was a rising tide of experimentations, trials and errors. The interweb had a few pages with the very basic stuff but only a bunch of pioneers ventured in what I’d call actual R&D (finding right materials, come up with clever assemblies, investing time and money in the quest for quality, etc).

At the time my brother was bugged by me training in my bedroom (his was just beside) and he decided to gift me with an Alesis DM5 kit (I love you too bro! ❤). It was a great starting point for DIY upgrades and I invested some spare time trying to make it sexier.

This was a WIP, basically the DM5 kit with DMPro brain, DIY mesh snare and a decent Roland FD7 hihat pedal. The rack was also actually two of them crammed together.

I actually achieved something: by 2008 I had a working kit with 5 toms, a kick, a mesh-head snare, several cymbals (mostly based on those noisy plastic DM5 kit pads but some was DIY PVC sheets bent in the form of a real cymbals, with triggers stuck underneath I used to call PVCymbals). The DM5 was paired to a DMPro and used as a mere trigger-to-midi input.

Here is how my last DIY attempt looked: a reworked Casio e-kick (the noisiest thing I’ve ever heard but for my toddlers), mixed cymbals and those internally triggered Remo practice pads all around. ❤ sniff… ;..)

It worked. Sadly the stuff was “cheap”… mostly triggered Remo and Peace practice pads, the snare built from a (very) old acoustic kit recovered from a basement, with a single layer mesh and an internal side-trigger built out of a neoprene sandwich. I ended up recovering some decent Roland CY-8 and CY-5, (ab)used old clunky Alesis pads as chinas/splashes and all-in-all, it worked.

I was proud of it but it almost fell apart during its sole gig at a friend’s wedding party. :D Luckily I took tools with me, did a couple of emergency surgery operation in pauses and nobody seemed to notice. I guess by the time we played, everybody was already drunk.

Reality is, make DIY stuff work is easy; making it solid and reliable as industry-level products is not!

After that episode my wife gave me a sage advice:

Stop waste your little time with DIY and buy a proper kit!

Now, imagine how annoyed a wife should be to ask you to BUY A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT! :)

Enters DM10 Studio Kit

I devoted sound money to buy a kit (and various spare parts) able to mimic my acoustic setup and I became an happy plug-and-play guy.

I went for Alesis after lingering over some Roland TD-9KV since I stumbled in a very great deal: a guy received a brand new kit for birthday by his parents who overheard him going fancy with the idea of having an electronic-drum. Too bad he was a DJ and was thinking about a beat-box module.
He decided to give the untouched kit away for half the price, since it was enough to buy the module he wanted.

I already had some additional CY here and there, as I said and spent some more money to buy an additional 12" snare pad (gaining one more tom, like in my acoustic kit).

I also headed to 682Drums that were selling a cheap and effective Mesh-head conversion kit for Alesis kits. The original mylar heads, coupled with a metal-plate based internal trigger assembly was really noisy and my neighbors was uncompromising at that time.

A pad here, a mesh there, some additional inputs via Alesis Trigger-IO and here is the final result:

Nooot bad at all! ❤ Banging this crap after years of low energy drumming was a pleasure! I could actually practice some metal without the drums falling apart.

All my half-baked stuff went back in the garage and bye-bye DIY dreams… for a while!
Then I decided it was time for my kids to begin practice and I recovered all my stuff to build this:

This shot was missing the DM5 brain, that has been eventually changed to the DMPro that has been eventually destroyed by a stray stick! ^_^’

It has been around for a couple of years before the DMPro display has been blasted by that very cutie over there who went bananas playing Manowar!
How to blame him after all? :D

Then came a new band

(aka: How I went back to DIY)

I mostly used the kit to study and nurtured the idea to record original stuff in my home studio. Being a renowned weirdo I built a linux-box with stuff like Ardour, Guitar Pro 6 (it used to support Linux natively) and other FOSS. The goal was to produce my music at home. For rehearsals with the band during the weekend, I had my acoustic kit (left in my parent’s house basement).

The configuration worked for some years (but for recordings due to Linux taking too much time to configure, but we’ll come to this in another post), until two months ago: Went out of Fashion officially disbanded and I was “hired” by Garden of Fear.

At the same time I was also relocating to a new house! No more neighbors to annoy: yay! Plenty of room to place a home studio with both acoustic and electronic kits: über-yay!!!

This opened up the possibility to play during the week’s evenings, using the DM10.

I took the solution as a sort of compromise not wanting to abandon my acoustic beast, but I soon discovered a new dimension in rehearsals: acoustic feeling can’t be beaten, ok… but adjustable volume, variety of sounds, ability to record directly via MIDI… all nice stuff, even if you play metal!

Sadly, playing real music on the stock DM10 kit kick-pad really sucks (sorry Alesis). The pad is ok and properly built but banging double bass patterns on that tiny 8" head simply doesn’t work. And dynamics suffer also.

In a sort of renewal frenzy I went to a local music store to test the new Roland TD-50 out and surprisingly I was very disappointed. Not that relocation and all, I was really akin to spend almost 8K to change my stuff, but heck, I could have considered an upgrade… in the meantime I wanted to play with the thing a bit and feel the magic of that almost-real supakit.

Let me say that (to me) it is not worth the money. Nice and sturdy kick pad but not for the price tag! And heavy too, the new KD-140 weights probably like my 7yo!
And with the new Alesis Strike Pro around the corner for 2.5K I really felt Roland was not an option.

Still I wanted (who am I trying to fool? I needed!) something more realistic and I felt time was mature to test my crafting skills again.

So I did, I finally succeeded and in my next posts I’ll try to tell how it went, what I learned and how to achieve (at least) my results.

Next post in the series

Real-feel e-kick

Stay tuned!

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