Fueled by the urge to create something and by the fact that I couldn't afford a drumkit back then, I came up with a plan to make an electronic drum kit.
The idea was simple, make something similar to the famous Roland V drums, only much, much more cheaper. I had always been playing drums on my computer
using the keyboard as the input. One day, I ripped it apart, soldered some wires and went hunting for some metal plates. When I came back, I taped those
wires to some metal plates and when these plates came in to contact, EUREKA! I heard the sound of the kick drum and I was happy, really really happy.
The basic plan was simple, use synthesizers like Cakewalk Pro or Garage Band (if your a mac junkie) which support MIDI Triggering from a normal computer keyboard as the input.
Ripoff an old keyboard and solder wires to the ends of the encoder chip. Now comes the part where you have to sit down and find out which two wires form what key combination when they are shorted.
So open up your favortie text editor with this modded keyboad connected. Now by trial and error find out the combinations just by shorting 1st wire with the rest and repeat it until you've
found out all the combinations. In my case, I configured Cakewalk to play a kick drum sound when triggered with a 'Q' from the keyboard, similarly an 'E' triggers a snare drum
and '5' triggers a closed hi-hat and so on. So all I had to do was to find out the combinations for 9 different keys, which formed a basic rock drum kit.
modded keyboard encoder chip
Once this is done find some metal plates that can be used as triggers. Now lets say you want a snare drum? You know the two wires that triggers the snare sound. Tape the first (soldering is also fine) wire to top and the second to the bottom (or vice versa, doesnt' matter). When these two plates come into contact it will trigger the key which Cakewalk (or garageband) will understand to be the trigger for a snare drum. But the job is just half done and now comes the hardest part. You have to include a spring action in between the plates to make sure they return to their original state of no contact when it is hit and released. I tried several ways to implement this with homemade springs, rubber etc but none of them really did the job well. Finally I gave up on it as it was consuming too much of my time. I hope to revive this project sometime in the future once I have the appropriate materials to be used.
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