DIY Electronic Drum Question

markyboy

Hi there,

I have an old Roland r-70 Drum Machine and am wondering if it's possible to use a bass drum pad to trigger it.

The Roland only has midi in. I'm suspecting the simple answer is no!

Any suggestions appreciated.

Mark.

frobisher

I'm no MIDI king to be honest, hopefully someone who knows more can chime in. My experience with electric BD trigger pedals of any sort is that they are seperate jack inputs. And this unit has a jack instead of MIDI cable so it seems to follow that form. I wonder if you had a drum module with a jack pedal input could you take a midi out, assign that channel to bass drum and then route it back into your unit? Just a thought!

cornbb

Yup, what he said ^

Although... Its technically possible to use the pad as a trigger for the drum machine without getting a dedicated module... if you have a soundcard/audio interface with jack or minijack in and MIDI out, you could use Max/MSP or Pure Data or something similar to convert the analogue trigger signals (which will essentially look like noisy audio signals) into outgoing MIDI messages and then send them onto the drum machine.

This is a bit of a hack and would involve more work than buying a trigger module. But you'd learn tons about audio and MIDI signals by implementing it! I've only thought about doing this because I've considered building my own MIDI drumkit on the cheap using Remo practice pads and cheap transducer mics as the triggers and then doing the conversions from analogue trigger signals to MIDI signals in software... I'm a cheapass, basically... I'll shut up now. Do what frobisher said

markyboy

Thanks for the advice lads. I appreciate it.