My DIY e-drum: real-feel kick

12 min readJul 30, 2017

Disclaimer: this post had a long introduction you can read here. I removed it from this post to save your time but decided to leave it somewhere to read.
I also apologize for the poor environment and lightning of the pictures but my man-cave is actually underground and a bit chaotic. I’m not a professional blogger and I took all shots with my phone. Thanks for understanding. :)

So after years of hesitation, half-baked attempts and research, and after ending up buying an Alesis DM10 kit on steroids, I’ve been able to build my first industry-level DIY e-drum pad.

Having finally an emplacement equipped for bricolage, and plenty of space helped a lot doing a polished job. To start with the first lesson, I can’t stress enough how having room to store work-in-progress without the need to setup and tear-down your bench each stinkin’ time will positively influence the result! In the past I had no place and each time I began working on DIY projects, 60% of the time was devoted to equipment and cleaning. In retrospective I see how overhead made me feel the urgency to get things done in a single session: in a word I was working in a hurry… no good!

Here it is, in its full glory: a second hand 18x22" cheap bass drum bought for 30 bucks, now triggering like hell!
In this post I’d like to share what I learned during the construction of this drum. Hope this can help someone as others helped me during the last weeks.

Starting point

First idea was to resurrect that 16x22" bass drum I already own. In retrospective that 16" floor tom, cut in half, would have become a great and portable e-kick, but I was lured by a real-size kick, so I only considered the bass.

It comes from my first 20 years old affordable drum set, still with me after enduring what seems to be a couple of atomic wars.
I don’t bang that stuff since… er… 2000 maybe?! It was just sitting there, covered in a pile of dust under a desktop in my rehearsal room.

Shells are still ok though, only mechanics would be better off in a trash bin. Sadly buying 16 new non-awful lugs, screws and hooks, a new wrapping and decent legs would have cost something around 150 euros… so despite my wife’s “first impression”, finding a new one proved cheaper in the end. :)

As I mentioned, I found a nice looking and pretty robust entry level kit for sale, and the guy was OK giving me only the bass drum for 30 bucks.
The lugs are pretty to see, legs are robust and the wrapping is a decent sparkling gray (I will improve it someday but so far it is there to stay).

First part: the crossbar

I then collected

a 3 meters bar for plasterboard structure — 4 €
a couple of L-shaped bracket with slotted holes on one branch — 3 €
black spray metal paint — 4 €
a bunch M4 screws and plastic washers (they actually was intended to be gaskets I guess, but they did the job) — less than 3 € total

Armed with the above I proceeded to recreate the usual cross-bar design you can find almost everywhere.

I ended up using a Dremel to cut the aluminum bar, but a pair of proper scissors would have done a quicker job. I used a punch to mark out the place where I’d had to drill holes in the bar and bolted them all together with M4 screws, metal washers and nuts. I used plastic washers under the metal ones to make sure there were no metal-to-metal contact, with the intention to remove possible false triggering due to small impulses propagating through the assembly.

Here is (part of) the arsenal you’ll need. You can spot a small piece of 5mm thick neoprene sheet, an orange 682Drums cone and a vent-hole female jack, always from 682Drums.

It is worth to say that, to avoid an hot-spot in the dead center, I decided to place the cross-bar between the upper side lugs (there are 8 lugs, not the top couple, but the ones below). This also prevented the bar to be placed diagonally across the drum.
This decision allowed the trigger to be placed in the vertical center (I play with a double pedal and I didn’t want the triggering to be asymmetrical) but far enough from the beaters.

Lessons learned from this step:

Move your trigger along the vertical axis, a bit off from the center, but if you plan to use a double pedal, keep it in the horizontal center so it will trigger evenly (may not be true for a 12" drum but across 22" you’ll notice the difference!).
Use plastic/gum washers to decouple metal surfaces so you won’t incur in clickety-clacky and false triggering.
L-brackets would be better with 2 holes on a side (or at least a slotted hole) so that you’ll keep the bar in position with 2 screws per side. The bass-drum receives lots of solicitations and your goal is to create solid stuff, right?
You’d better to have lugs with 2 screws so the L-bracket (which MUST and I repeat, MUST have a slotted hole on the shell side) will be kept firmly in place. The slot is necessary to adjust the height of the cone; I also had to experiment a bit to find a proper combination of decoupler height, bracket positions and 3mm plastic washers that fit right. No slotted hole, no simple and effective design! Keep it in mind.
Plasterboard structure bar is easy to work with and reliable. And cheap. And 4cm wide, which (as we’ll see right away) allows you to slot the trigger in with its foam decoupler.

Here is a spoiler shot of the bar with the final full assembly (trigger, wiring etc.). I can’t find shots of the bar alone, I must have forgot the take them. The top of the drum is at the top of the picture.

Spoiler! Spoiler! We’ll get to the trigger in a while.

Aside from a couple of scratches in the paint that I managed to fix with a soft brush before mounting the head, it is sexy and sturdy!

What matters: the trigger

For yet-another-time I then tried to assemble a piezo trigger with recycled material: a neoprene sheet cut in circles to act as a “cone”, plus a leftover of insulating foam to act as a decoupler.

I can’t explain how much this crap sucks! I can’t even count how many tutorials on YouTube promote such cheap solution, claiming great results… well, don’t waste time, this is sh#t!

The final assembly plain sucked, and I’d still have to drill a hole in the shell for a panel jack…

So I decided that R&D about trigger-related materials was really not worth the pain: a pro-grade cone costs 6 to 12 euros, with R-Drums on top of the fork. I was enticed by the R-Drums decoupler (they are also cheap and seem to work great) so I was about ordering cones, decouplers and other stuff from them.

Then I incidentally spotted some 35mm stainless steel washers for something like 3€/20pcs at a hardware store. A couple of neurons that usually never talked to each other had a sudden handshake and I recalled of this video by V-Drum Tips showing a che… low-budget e-drum trigger design. The decoupler was made from an old mouse pad. It was a bit poor in performance (decoupling-wise) but hey… there is no rim trigger on a bass-drum! ;)
So I decided for one last desperate attempt before slapping a big L on my forehead.

And man, it worked out great! :)

I used a 5mm thick neoprene sheet I already bought (2 square meters for 15€ if I remember correctly) a cutter and some Bostik glue to shape a rectangular 3-plies neoprene foam base for the washer.

Now, I learned from V-Drum Tips video that piezos trigger best when they sit on top of a hard surface; that’s the reason R-Drums decouplers have those metal discs on top. Some guys on DIY v-drums forums overseas achieved good results creating two-layers mylar discs out of used heads for that purpose. Or so it seems.

Well, there is another thing about piezos that can help achieving good triggering: they produce more current when bent than when pressed. That 10mm hole in the middle of the big washer gave me the idea that, centering the piezo on it would have granted the best results since the piezo could “bend” a bit inside the hole.

This stuff costs cents where R-Drums cost bucks! There can be a reason for this but to date I don’t know any.

Now, I don’t have direct experience with R-Drums decoupler but this assembly did miracles over each and every previous attempt!

Since R-Drums decouplers was no more on my shopping list I went down the known road and ordered cones, vent-hole stereo jacks and other stuff from 682Drums. In my previous post I told how I happily converted my stock DM10 kit to a mesh variant using 682Drums conversion kit.
Their cones trigger pretty well and are very difficult to tear apart, as I discovered when I tried to cut a drive for the piezo wires. I also like the color! :D

The final assembly is a bit more nice to see. Piezo and cone are held in place by thin bi-adhesive tape.

But the jacks really stand out for their quality! They slip into a vent hole perfectly, stereo ones have colored soldering poles (aluminum/gold) and come with a generous washer to keep them in place.

Lesson learned creating the trigger:

Nothing beats an industry cone. Period. Maybe one day I’ll learn what the hell they are made of… I tried to take one to a plastic/foam shop in town and they had no clue. They told me that it seems more like a filter than an actual dampener or foam. Anyway as long as you don’t want to produce hundreds of e-drums, the price tag is affordable enough to avoid wasting time with DIY crap. Materials R&D costs. A lot!
Vent-hole jacks rocks! Again, those are the most important parts of your e-drum pad: don’t go the cheap way. And remember to connect the wiring in a solid but removable way: mammoth connectors are the best way to go IMO.
You can at least test with decouplers, thanks to big washers and neoprene/closed-cell foams. Again, if you have stuff in house you can achieve good results. If not, going the industry way can prove the easiest and quicker solution.
682Drums is a good provider for cones, piezos and jacks (but read on for the rest).

Almost a setback: the mesh head

I also ordered a 2ply mesh-head, which actually proved the most expensive item in the cart, in the end.

Here is the bass with the mesh on it. Pretty anonymous uh?

The first test went good in terms of sensitivity but during actual play I had a lot of double triggering, mostly with hard hits or fast patterns. Observing the physical behavior my understanding was that the head had too much rebound, actually detaching from the cone tip when overly solicited.

I tried rising the retrigger rate sky-level with the only effect I couldn’t play 16th notes over 140bpms. Bleah!

I experienced a sort of emotional setback: it seemed I still had a lot to experiment. I found myself thinking about additional assemblies to dampen the head with foam cushions applied in the center or something similar… Luckily I reopened the drum to put some 3cm thick dampening sheets (link the ones in the image) all around the inner shell. The goal was just to lower the (already low) noise produced by the resonant head. Just because perfectionism, you know…

I pressed the border of each sheet to the drum head, cutting slots around the L-brackets so that the full inside of the drum was covered with dampener. I took the exceeding part off the resonant edge with a cutter.

The resonant head received a dampener circle took in place with tapestry tape, while the three sheets of foam are held in place by themselves.

I also glued a circle-cut dampening sheet inside the resonant head so that it was totally neutralized.

Believe it or not, that dampened the batter head completely! An I mean completely! I tried to speed up until my feet failed, then tried double stroke rolls with sticks to go a bit faster and not a single glitch.

I had to adjust the sensitivity of my module to a higher value compared to the 8" pad and was also able to lower the threshold, thus having a reliable dynamic, actually similar to the real thing, and even the softer bump now triggers a very low-volume sample.

Lesson learned about mesh heads:

682Drums heads may not be the best heads out there… The rebound was really annoying (I had to stick a falam-slam in the center, that raised the noise a bit) but the dampening incidentally eliminated the retriggering problem brilliantly.
EDIT: after a couple of months playing the thing I have to agree with other writers about the poor quality of 682Drums mesh heads. They are robust and visually appealing but they are probably the worst heads in terms of rebound and physical behavior. Even if I tamed them to an acceptable state, for the future I’ll surely head (no pun intended) to drum-tec for the best results and don’t mind the 20 bucks more, they’ll be well spent!
The playing feeling is decent even if not perfect: worse of an acoustic 22" kick but way better than KD-140! A better head can improve the feeling a lot.
I can speculate about a 20" or better yet 18" shell to provide — paradoxically — a more natural feeling with such an elastic head. I may test my 16" floor tom in the future, but just for sake of experimentation: the 22" beast rocks!
My DIY bass seems to me way better than the most expensive Roland product on the market. This is a bold statement, and I appreciate it may be the feeling of a full-size bass-drum under my foot, but the triggering is so smooth and dynamic! Nothing I played before provide such dynamics in a headphone.

Conclusions

Comparing my poor DIY trigger assembly with what I have now I can say the first attempt was garbage! Yes, it triggered but absolutely nothing that can be used, not even for practice. Unreliable at best.

All in all I’m very happy with the result and in the end I spent around 80 bucks, including the bass drum itself, with the mesh head being the higher expense (36 bucks alone).
My kit begins to look gorgeous and I can now play it during rehearsals with my band without the feeling to bang on a piece of wood.

Right materials and a sturdy engineering are key to success. Actually there is not that more magic if not for materials and construction, so I may state the obvious, but bear with me…

I can assure using proper cones and a hard surface under the trigger really outperforms any other DIY stuff. It is robust, looks pro and costs just a few bucks. If you don’t like soldering you can get a cone and jack with a wired piezo already attached for a little price and connect them with a mammoth connector (clips or screws, it’s really easy).

Glued 5mm neoprene layers makes for a good decoupler, and a 35mm steel washer stuck on top seems to mimic both design and working of R-Drums stuff. Which is not that expensive to be honest, so if you feel like going the easy way it probably is the best solution, coupled with a proper drum head.

Yet, I had the materials at hand and decided to do something my own. If you are in my situation, I hope this post can give your project a boost.

Good results guaranteed with this setup! ;)

Next post in the series

DIY Off-set symmetrical “middle” pedal.
Stay tuned! :)