This page is about the edrumming hardware dedicated to the Endre-eNerd project. For info on Endre's acoustic drums and cymbals please visit the tech info page at endrehuszar.com »»»

Control Pads

The setup has three heavily modded Alesis Control Pads. One important modification was that the on-board electronics can optionally be bypassed and the unprocessed analog trigger signal of the eight pads is wired to a 25 pin D-Sub socket.

Another modification is that there are two LEDs near each pad and there's a circuitry to control them via MIDI.

Finally, the units can be powered via MIDI by using central power supply combined with a MIDI through box.

"The need for these LEDs arose when I realized how hard it was to memorize a setup without any visual feedback. It's absolutely vital to remember what a pad does in a specific setup, as every pad can have a number of totally different functions like triggering individual samples, starting drum loops or muting a mixer channel or even controlling the parameters of an effect processor, which might change even within one tune. And messing that up can have a much more dramatic effect than simply hitting the wrong note on a piano, so I programmed the LEDs to indicate which pads belong to the same group and have similar functions, whether they trigger samples, control the mixer or the playback transport etc. and once you get familiar with the meaning of these lights and set them up properly for every scene, then things become a lot easier on stage with these pads." Endre-eNerd

Custom8 Pads

These three custom built pads have no on-board circuitry, they only have a D-Sub output for the individual trigger signals.

"They were designed to survive the end of the world, so they are very-very heavy and they're really good to play because you can feel how solid they are and they don't pick up the vibrations transmitted by the drum rack they're mounted on, but otherwise they're perfectly ordinary drum pads." Endre-eNerd

Scene Launch Pads

These three pads have a dedicated function that never changes: the rightmost one always triggers the next scene, the leftmost one triggers the previous scene and the middle one retriggers the current scene. (For those unfamiliar with the Ableton Live terminology, a scene is a set of samples that belong together, typically the parts of the songs like an intro, a verse or a chorus.)

UKKO

UKKO is a one of a kind drum contact mic which can be use for both miking and triggering. They're made by a Finnish company named B-band and they have several advantages over traditional mics.

The mic is a self-adhesive ribbon stuck inside the drumshell, which is connected to a little preamp which is permanently mounted on the drum at the vent hole. The preamp has a standard 3 pin XLR socket, so once installed, drum miking only takes to plug the cables into the stage box.

Since the pickup is stuck to the shell inside the drum, it is nearly completely insensitive to crosstalk, which makes UKKO suitable for triggering electronics: the mic signal coming to the audio mixer can be fed to the trigger-to-MIDI converter via the channel inserts or direct outs of the mixer, so there's no need to use dedicated drum triggers any more.

MegaDrum

MegaDrum is the central hardware piece that collects all trigger signals throughout the whole kit and converts them into MIDI notes. It is the only trigger to MIDI converter in the world that's capable of handling a total of 56 trigger inputs.