as the proud owner of a used Alesis DM-5 I'd toyed with the idea of using the trigger
inputs in the back for something.  Honestly, since I got the thing in 2004,
there was little other reason to use it - it was old and the internal sounds were
a bit dated. 




The problem arose from the fact that I didn't own any drum pads, and wasn't really
a drummer so I couldn't justify spending hundreds on a set of ddrums or pintechs
or whatever.  I started buy building a set of electronic drums out of some
remo pads, using the plans on electronicdrums.com. 
While the pads themselves worked great, it quickly became apparent that I had no idea what to mount them on. I did't want to buy a separate cymbal stand for each one, because I have limited room for storage. I tried jerry-rigging stuff out of coper pipe and industrial screws but I ended up with horrible cross-triggering problems.



So what was I to do?  well, for about a year, nothing.  Then a brief rewatching
of some old depeche mode videos reminded me of their "spookaphone", a odd sculpture
of pipes that triggered samples during performances on their late 80's tours. 
"Gosh," I thought "It'd be cool to have one of those!"  Then I came to the
conclusion that I wasn't sure what was stopping me from having one of those. 
I did some checking, and saw that Pintech made some tubular drum triggers. 
They looked decent, but also seemed a little, hmm...small.  And kind of expensive. 
Did I really want to pay $60 for a small tube?



I endeavoured to make my own.  My goal was to cut the cost-of-ownership in
half - 2 triggers for the price of one.




My first prototypes were encouraging.  I had some leftover radio shack piezo
elements sitting around, procuring a 1/4" jack was easy enough, and a quick trip
to home depot provided me with appropriate lengths of 1.5" PVC tube.  I was
able to slide the element in, hotglue it into place, and bang on it to my heart's
content.



Then I tried to figure out how to mount it.  It was then I discovered that
drum rack tube, which I had assumed was fairly standard in size, is narrower than
1.5" PVC pipe.  No clamp I had was going to work.  I tried using a smaller
pipe coupler - not really meant to fit in the larger pipe but a few whacks with
a mallet took care of that - but it too was still too big.   I returned to
to my now-cluttered workbench and endeavored to try again. 



I tried using pipe joints and carriage bolts to stick the thing in a standard accessory mount. This emt with some sucess, but I had the problem that it now created a rather nice pivot point and after repeated striking the trigger would slowly rotate away from the striker. That was no good.





I tried using a smaller PVC pipe, which was now too narrow to fit into a drum rack
clamp.  It occurred to me that if I could just thicken it a bit, it'd probably
fit fine, but I'd need something with a little "give."  Good, old-fashioned
mousepad rubber seemed to do the trick.  I got it clamped in good, I wedged
a piezo in the tube...and promptly snapped the piezo in half.  Okay, that wasn't
supposed to happen. I needed smaller piezo elements. Back to the Shack!




By this time, the clerks at Radio Shack were starting to recognize me as "the guy who keeps buying piezo buzzers and 1/4" jacks." One clerk pointed out that on this trip, I was buying a differnet size than normal and was I sure that this was what I meant to grab? I assured the guy that, yes, this was indeed what I was looking for. I took a bunch of smaller piezos home, and thought about ways of affixing them to the inside of a small PVC tube without bending or breaking them.


I thought about this problem for a little bit, and decided that there was no reason the piezos had to be inside, so long as they were firmly affixed somewhere to the tube and could pick up vibrations. I could just screw them tight to the end of the tube, and I wouldn't even need to worry about trying to pry them out of those tiny plastic cases. I quickly rationalized this with some pseudophysics about swinging pendulums and mass-dampening at the pivot point or some crap like that. I plugged in the first one, and wouldn't you know it, I had a working drum trigger. I drilled holes in standard pipe caps to hold the 1/4" jack, spent a lot of time with a soldering iron placing big, ugly globs of solder on various contact points, and then I painted it. To dampen the "thock" of hitting a PVC tube with a drumstick, I tried wrapping the whole tube with rubber but that dampened the strike too much. In the end I just sprayed on some tool ruberrizer, and not only did that dampen a little of the noise, but it looked pretty cool too.





I was quickly able to assemble a few more, and the drum clerks at Guitar Center kept wondering why I was buying so many rack clamps. I didn't think "4" was so many but apparnelty most people don't come in and buy that many at once. Whatever.




Total cost:

• 8ft pvc pipe: $3.25 (of which I used less than half, so about $1.50 )


• 4 PVC pipe caps: $2


• 4 radio shack piezo buzzers: $10


• 4 1/4" jacks: $8


• One plain rubber mouspad: $4


• One can spray ruberizer: $6


• 4 rack mounting clamps: $80


• Some speaker wire I had in the basement

So about $110 all told for everything. I could make the cost/item even cheaper by making more with the resulting pipe, but I'm fine with 4. I met my goal of keeping the 2-to-1 ratio of cost to comemrcial ones, and while I'm sure there's some difference in build quality and maybe even playability, mine are also significantly lighter. If I rule out the cost of the clamps, then the cost/trigger ends up being like $10 each.

Granted, my own experiements were more expensive since I had several false starts, tried a few different sized clamps, etc. But hey, maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes.

I have also noted that right-angle cables are probably the smartest to use with this, as they don't stick out and get in the way.

With the leftover parts from my experiments, I am also electrifying a cowbell to work as a combination drum trigger/cowbell, and I may use one to craft an integrated piezo bridge pickup for a tumbi.

Slightly more step-by-step photos At my flickr page.