Creating a homemade travel/practice/electronic kit

Mont

Junior Member
I'm off to uni next year, and unfortunately can't take my beloved kit with me.

I've been looking at mesh-head kits and electronic kits and can't seem to find anything decent for a reasonable price. I've decided to use an old kit (the CB I first started with) that isn't really worth anything to make my own compact, electronic kit.

The plan is to take off all the various lugs, cut the shells down to a much smaller depth, reattach the lugs, put mesh heads on the kit and then use drum triggers.

I was just wondering if anyone had any experience with this, and what people thought of how the sound would be affected by the decrease in the depth of the drums?
I'll probably only have batter heads on the toms, with a reso on the bass and snare only.

Thanks a lot, and if you have any other ideas for a small, cheap, traveling kit let me know!
 
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I have done exactly this with a pearl export snare and a tom. It worked better than the mesh pads that came with my Roland TD9. A few tips:

It makes no difference what depth the drum is. I sawed mine in half to get two drums from each. To make the trigger I bought a replacement foam cone from Roland UK for about £8/$12. They come with a bit you peel off revealing a glue patch. Attach to this a piezo transducer (Maplin: £1.99/$3).

Then build a crossbeam inside the drum. I just screwed to blocks in then put the beam across.

Then I built a little platform which I made by bolting layers of thin wood onto the crossbeam until it was the right height.

Finally, just glue your piezo/cone to the platform so that when you put the mesh head on it compresses about 3mm.

Make a hole in the shell and attach a 1/4" jack and you're there.

Obviously you need a module to actually get drum sounds (e.g. http://www.gak.co.uk/en/alesis-dm6-drum-module/43960). Mine was the TD9, but it's expensive. I'm not sure how cheaper ones handle homemade pads.

There's a forum for people who make these. Try google
 
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