How to use pedal for drums?

[flbo]

Hi there,

lots of people put bass drums in their piano music. I wondered how to put a bass drum as pedal under the piano? Any ideas?

[Jokeyman123]

There is no simple answer to this if I understand you correctly.

 

The only option I have used to play a drum sound from an external bass drum or midi drum pad into my PX560 involves buying an inexpensive digital drum pad system that has 1) a midi output jack to connect to the PX560 and 2) a drum trigger input to connect a digital bass drum pedal to that. So you will need 2 extra pieces of equipment to do this. Several companies make smaller drum pad controllers that have these options-the 4-pad Alesis and Alternate mode Drumkat allow for connecting a midi bass drum pedal to those, and then connecting those to the midi in port of your PX560. You'd also have to experiment to see how the drum pads and bass pedal respond once connected to the PX560 since you have to match midi "note numbers" to the PX560 to make sure you are matching the digital drum setup to the right notes in the PX560 drumkits. A digital drumkit or pad controller will output a specific "note number" assignment in order to control which of the drum sounds will respond-if there are 4 pads, it will output 4 different "note numbers'" and the bass drum pedal will trigger another as if you are playing each individual key on the PX560 to get each drum sound. the plus side to this is that now you can input any drum/percussion parts to the PX560 as if you are playing an acoustic drumkit with sticks, feet or your hands-these pad setups usually are sensitive enough to play with your fingers or hands. You can also obtain digital hi-hat triggers that will connect to the multi-pad setups to produce the drum kit hi-hat sounds digitally.  Now you have a full drumkit setup to play and record complete drum tracks into the PX560 midi recorder.

 

I use a Simmons SDMP1 digital drum pad set or my Yamaha DTXtreme drum brain connected to my DTX digital drums and can connect a digital bass drum pedal to that and play these setups into the PX560 midi recorder, including the pads and hi-hat trigger, but it is certainly not a simple or very portable setup if you need to play gigs. I do not know of any simple way to do this maybe someone else here may. The other-acoustic-alternative is to do what some drummers are now doing to play in smaller venues-you can connect an acoustic bass drum pedal to a small cajun style drum and play this as you would a drum kit bass drum, but this is not what you want to do I don't think.You cannot to my knowledge, use any kind of expression pedal or on/off sustain type pedal to directly trigger the bass drum or any other sound directly connected to the PX560. You will always need some type of drum trigger to midi converter setup to trigger any sounds in the PX560 from an external source designed for digital drums if you are not going to input the sounds from the keys. You will not be able to directly connect a digital bass drum trigger and bass drum pedal to the midi input of the PX60 to play the internal bass drum, or any other sound. You will always need some type of digital drum brain/module to convert the physical action of a digital drum pad to a midi signal.

[Jokeyman123]

One more commnent-I'm not sure because I've never had one, but I think the Behringer or similar foot pedal controllers used for program snd other cc changes might be able to act as a trigger for drum sounds directly connected to the midi in on the PX560, but this is not what these were specifically designed for. I'd have to study the docs for one of these to know if these csn be programmed to do what you want.

[flbo]

Hi Jokeyman123,

it took a while before I managed to look deaper into that. First of all: Great description - many thanks! Understood everything from this detailed response. Going to try out one of the two options ... and report the results.