HiHat and Ride Strange Behaviour (notes change randomly)

[madpsychot]

I'll try not to turn this into a huge story....

Megadrum module with 56 inputs, and so far I have the snare, kick, Toms, a few cymbals working brilliantly. All going though USB to my laptop with Superior Drummer 3. So far so good.

I set up the hi hat, and the hi hat pedal. It works brilliantly. (better than my Roland TD27). Last to setup was the ride. I have struggled and struggled with this setup. I used the assigned ride inputs (I used the assigned Ride input which I believe was the input after the snare drum, and the following input which is by default assigned to a cymbal. These inputs just were not working (not sure if this is hardware or some faults in my wiring up the sockets). So I moved the ride to Aux18/19 and Aux20/21. It worth mentioning that I already moved the the hihat to Aux 16/17 as I know I damaged the hihat connection plug.

So the layout I have is HiHat = Aux16/17, Ride Bow+Bell = Aux 18/19 and Ride Bow+Edge = Aux 20/21

Yesterday I had a situation where the ride was working, and I was maybe 75% to getting it working flawlessly. The hihat sounds were working, and I had the ride playing not 84 for the bow, 86 for the edge and 85 for the bell. As I was playing I played a few notes with the hihat pedal press, and the ride cymbal switched it's sounds to the hihat. As in on the Midi log, when I played the ride, even though I had told it to play Note 84, the midi log was reporting that I was generating not 63. I did a restart, even a reset of the module, loaded back in my settings, and got this same problem again when I pressed a note on the hihat pedal.

Has anyone got any clue as to what might be going on here?

[madpsychot]

I just wanted to post an update to my last post, because things are acting very strangely.

I factory reset the Megadrum, and then connected only the hihat. I had my old settings for the hihat, so I loaded them in:







This works perfectly, and I have to say it's the best eDrum hihat I've ever played. Then I connected both cables from the Ride. These were plugged into Aux 18/19 and Aux 20/21









These settings work just fine. Now I'm not sure if it's the hihat controller, but at some point when I hit something a little harder (like the hihat), the note cuts off as if it's been choked. Now when I play the ride cymbal it acts like a hihat. The hihat pedal even controls the note of the ride cymbal. Here's the most confusing thing for me: When I check the ride cymbal, I have set it to play notes 84, 85, and 86. These correspond to the notes in Superior Drummer 3 for the ride cymbal. But when I check the MIDI log, here's what I see:






From the MIDI log, you can see that the hihat is acting as it should, with bow and edge hits, at various velocities. The orange notes are me hitting the Ride cymbal at various velocities, and remember that the note is set to either 84 or 86 for the ride, and all I see is note 63 being generated.

I then checked every other input, and there is no pad or cymbal set to 63. The only place that I can think of that is generating note 63 is one of the hihat open states. But that makes no sense. What makes absolutely no sense is that the hihat controller would affect the note of the ride. The ride simply switches it's role as a ride and becomes a second hihat.

Any ideas?

[dmitri]

Post the HiHat Pedal settings screenshot. I suspect you somehow set 'HiHat Input' to the input number of the Ride input.

[madpsychot]

Thanks Dmitri, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster. I for sure put the correct hi hat input into the pedal. I've decided that the two cable ride is just too much hard work to get it to work properly. I'm not currently converting it a Yamaha style ride cymbal using a 10k resistor. I'm currently working on getting that to work. The advantage is that I have to Lemon ride cymbals that will be quite nice to have in the kit. I'll keep you all posted as to how that turns out.

Appreciate the reply

[madpsychot]

I thought I'd put an update about my troubles in case it can help others. Without exaggeration, I have spent almost all my free hours trying to get my Lemon ride cymbal to give me 3 distinct zones. I have concluded that the new versions of the ride cymbal are made differently from the older models, of which I have one on another drumkit. The bell on that cymbal is much more sensitive (and it's connected to a Roland TD27). Even so I still get the odd mishit note on that ride.

So I decided to convert my ride from a 2 cable into a Yamaha style ride, by attaching the edge switch to the main socket using a 10k ohm resistor. And I was making good progress getting 3 zones working, but again I believe the new versions from Lemon make the bell much harder to register a clean hit.




What I ended up doing was disconnecting the switch from the bell, and attaching a small piezo sensor on top of the switch. I then fed the wire from the piezo through the existing hole, and wiring that to the second socket of the ride. So basically I have a socket that is the bow and edge (switch) going to the Ride 1 connection, and a separate piezo sensor wired to the Ride 2 connection.

In Megadrum I simply use two inputs. The first is a simple dual cymbal setup with bow and edge. The second input is used a single piezo input for the bell. From my initial tests I can't see a downside to this approach. I've adjusted the thresholds so that hitting the bow doesn't trigger the bell, and the bell doesn't trigger the bow. The cymbal choke stops the edge, bow and bell. The bell is now super sensitive and the ride as a whole behaves much more like a real ride cymbal.

Anyhow - I thought it might help somebody else to read my solution.