Build your own Reed switch driven Bass Drum Pedal!

**Reldan** · Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

To do this you need:

An actual bass drum pedal
Bass drum practice pad
A couple feet of speaker cable
Male 1/8" Audio Plug End
Reed Switch (or Relay)
A small, strong magnet
Electrical Tape
Soldering stuff

Get the pedal from Craigslist or a local music store (or if, like me, you're a drummer you have one already). A practice pad can be had for around $50 online or at your local music shop. Everything else should be purchasable at Radio Shack. You'll need to dig into their drawers to find stuff - the only Reed Switches they sell will be in the drawer marked "Relays" and not in the drawers marked "Switches." I bought 2 sets of 2 1/8th" Rare Earth Magnets and find that stacked together they provide a suffiicient magnetic field to consistently trigger the switch.

Solder the speaker wire to the 1/8" audio plug on one end, and to the Reed Switch on the other. It doesn't really matter which wires go to which because all you're trying to detect is the opening and closing of a simple circuit.

Tape the magnet to the bottom of the front part of your pedal.

Plug the audio plug into the drum controller's bass drum input.

Attach the pedal to the practice pad and find the spot directly below the magnet where the pedal stops when it strikes the pad. Position the reed switch to that location so that the magnet comes close enough to trigger the switch, but there's no actual physical contact. A "Big Rock Finish" section in perpetual loop in practice mode is good for testing this.

I had to take one of the bottom struts out of my controller to fit the practice pad underneath. The end result is absolutely fantastic. Not only is this about as realistic as it's going to get, I can actually use real bass drum pedal techniques to do the double-hits on some of the harder songs. Even better, my leg doesn't fatigue anywhere near as quickly as with the toy pedal because I'm not having to exert force directly into a coiled spring with every hit. This also isn't going to break. I'll post pictures later tonight to give an idea of how this can be setup.

I was initially inspired by the pushbutton method, but felt that slamming a small push-switch with a foot pedal a few thousand times would eventually create too much wear and tear. This method has no physical contact other than the beater hitting the practice pad, and the practice pad is designed specifically to take this kind of abuse.

Here's a couple pics. The above one shows the whole setup. below is a closeup of the switch. It's basically a cylindrical blue thing with wires coming off each end. I've taped it down (white electrical tape) to the baseplate of my pedal so that it's directly underneath the spot that I taped the magnet to (not shown).

**NoPance** · Joined: 19 Sep 2007 Posts: 215 Location: Raleigh, NC

This is fantastic!

The pedal is realy the only thing holding me back on maxing out some of my expert scores, so the prospect of using a real pedal has been really really exciting.

It sounds like this is a perfect solution to this problem. Essentially you're building the exact same circuitry as the plastic pedal, but putting it on a real one--very clever.

I will definitely be trying this out.
_________________

Goals:
[x] Get 360 back so I can actually play RB - 12/6/07
[x] Beat expert drum career - 12/9/07

XBL GT - No Pance

**NoPance** · Joined: 19 Sep 2007 Posts: 215 Location: Raleigh, NC

Two questions:

Does the speaker wire need to be mono? Or do you use stereo cable to make a circuit (one wire to each lead on the switch, then both wires into the stereo plug)?

Also, Radioshack doesn't sell Reed Switches anymore near me, but they do have Reed Relays which should have reed switches inside. Would that be ok to use?
_________________

Goals:
[x] Get 360 back so I can actually play RB - 12/6/07
[x] Beat expert drum career - 12/9/07

XBL GT - No Pance

**Reldan** · Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

**NoPance** · Joined: 19 Sep 2007 Posts: 215 Location: Raleigh, NC

**Dacvak** · Joined: 20 Jan 2007 Posts: 111

Could this be set up to theoretically use double-bass pedals and actually work?

I've been looking for a double-bass pedal mod and haven't found anything decent yet. But if this would work, well damn, I'm making it.

~Dac

**Reldan** · Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

My pedal is a double-bass - I haven't actually set it up for the second pedal yet. I plan to do so this weekend.

What I'll do is simply set up the second pedal like the first one, and then run both audio plugs into a splitter and plug that into the controller.

The drawback is that if you have either pedal fully pressed down (open circuit) then it's not going to register hits from the other pedal.

There probably is some way to get this to work perfectly using a protoboard and gates to build an actual circuit with logic and stuff, but that honestly is more complicated than simply releasing the pedal after each hit when doing double bass action. If someone wanted to design, test, and post a schematic for it, I'd give it a try

**NoPance** · Joined: 19 Sep 2007 Posts: 215 Location: Raleigh, NC

Did the deed tonight and it works great!

A lot more responsive than the regular pedal, and man it feels good to actually be hitting something instead of that piece of plastic.

I got a Gibraltar pad as well, and it's actually a little mooshy for me (not sure if I just need to tighten the action on my pedal or what). Probably exchange it for the promark pad which is rubber instead.

Thanks for posting about this. I was keeping combo a LOT better than normal, and I can't wait to go back and redo some songs that were sloppy b/c of the bass.
_________________

Goals:
[x] Get 360 back so I can actually play RB - 12/6/07
[x] Beat expert drum career - 12/9/07

XBL GT - No Pance

**GurnKiller** · Joined: 17 Oct 2007 Posts: 2225 Location: Central NJ

I NEED to try this. I'm so sick of breaking combos in Epic, Tom Sawyer, and Cherub Rock because the action on the RB pedal sucks ass.
_________________

Proud Carungiist - If you are a Carungiist, put this in your sig. Let's see how many Carungiists are on ScoreHero!

yakityyakblah wrote:

OMG it's called scorehero not shitty argument hero.

**Reldan** · Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

Let me know if the ProMark pad works better. I only went with the Gibraltar because it was all the local Guitar Center had in stock. I've got another week that I could return this pad and order something else. I wouldn't mind having a bit more rebound from impact, although I wouldn't say that the Gibraltar pad is "bad" or anything.

I will say that positioning the switch and the magnet perfectly is absolutely crucial to getting this to work right. The most annoying thing in the world is to break combo because the switch double-registered. I think the right position is going to be a bit different for each pedal design, so it's a matter of experimentation to find the sweet spot.

I honestly have no idea how people could play say, Blackened, using the RB pedal.

**myzrvw** · Joined: 13 Dec 2007 Posts: 7

I've been trying to think of a way to use the beater as the switch instead of something located on the pedal itself. I'm just not sure if having a magnet on the beater would work.

**Reldan** · Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 91

**Dacvak** · Joined: 20 Jan 2007 Posts: 111

If someone (like you) could design a fully working double-bass pedal using real drum pedals, I would buy that off of you so fast, dude.

I'm not big into any sort of engineering, so I'm not too enthusiastic about building my own, but I'd sure be willing to pay top dollar to have someone else build it for me. XD

Let me know exactly how your double-bass works. I keep my foot pressed, but that's not to say that I press down on the pedal. It's more like I keep my foot just rested on it, which usually has enough weight to press the pedal down.

I'd love to figure out a way to double-bass, though. =/ Tom Sawyer is a bitch without it.

~Dac

**NoPance** · Joined: 19 Sep 2007 Posts: 215 Location: Raleigh, NC

I ended up staying with the Gibraltar. After some modifications to my throne height and the pedal I'm using, I got the responsiveness I was looking for. It does feel great, it just has less rebound than traditional BD practice pads (but enough to do hard fast stuff, like the the Tom Sawyer double-hits).
_________________

Goals:
[x] Get 360 back so I can actually play RB - 12/6/07
[x] Beat expert drum career - 12/9/07

XBL GT - No Pance

**disquette** · Joined: 12 Dec 2007 Posts: 82

I'm going to add a post for complete noobs like myself who have no prior experience with electronics and whose experience with a soldering iron is watching my dad solder some pipes about 18 years ago.

Step 1 - acquiring the items.
I went to a few radio shacks and none of them had a Reed Relay, and ended up calling around after the first 3 in-person failed visits until I found one.

Also, seeing those small little rare earth metal magnets, I couldn't believe that they generated enough force, so I bought some bigger magnets in addition to the rare earth ones. Note, in the OP, I thought he meant "2 packs of 2.125" magnets". What he bought (I'm assuming, since radio shack offered them and they work) are 2 packs of 1/8" magnets, and there are 2 per pack. You can see the rare earth magnets on the left, and the big ones one to the right of them.

With that, here's pic1 of all the stuff. The Reed switch is in the back center, on top of the notepad text of the OP. Also, note that I didn't get regular speaker wire. This was probably a mistake, as my wires are not connected nicely like dual speaker wire would be. It's an aesthetic thing that I'll have to clean up later:

here's a close up of the primary actors in this gig:

Ok, so when I looked at the Reed switch, I see that it has *three* prongs on one side:

A check with an ohm meter verified that I could use the outer most prong to make the circuity work. Note, to do this, we had to use one of the magnets to close the circuit inside the Reed relay. We could bend the prongs outwards to make for better working (and eventual mounting) conditions:

Additionally, for those of you who are magnet-dumb like me, see how I'm holding the rare-earth magnets? This will close the switch if you stack them in a magneto-train (for lack of a better term) and hold the "tube" of magnets parallel to the reed switch. It took a min to figure out that the reed switch is omni-directional as far as *where* the magnets are with respect to it, but that the magnets themselves had to be oriented in a specific direction.

Next up, strip one end of a wire and solder it to one of the prongs of the Reed relay:

I had my dad do this since he was familiar with soldering. He did this by dipping the soldering wire in a flux paste (optional, I think, but it helps the solder be more fluid and wick into the connection), then using the soldering iron, he melted the solder which "drips" onto the connection.

Next up, you do the same thing with the prong (and a different wire of course!) on the other side of the Reed switch:

**Optional step, but I think it's a good one**

Dad had some tubular shrink stuff to make the heretofore exposed solder connection more protected. You slide this black tubing (also obtainable from radio shack) from the far end of the wire up to the soldering point.

You then heat it up and it will shrink for a tight fit. Dad had a heat gun, so that made it pretty easy. He said that you need to be careful though, as heat guns get hot enough that you can melt the wires (and probably the components of the Reed relay):

Now strip the other ends of the wires, slip the shrink tubing over them, AND ALSO THE UNSCREWED BASE OF THE AUDIO JACK (the hard plastic black tube). I emphasize this because the first time we soldered the audio jack on, we realized that we hadn't put the base of the audio jack on the wires first, so we had to unsolder it, slip it over, then resolder. Here's a pic of the soldered ends of the audio jack:

We then screwed the base of the audio jack on, then slipped up the shrink tube to it to protect the wires from rubbing against it, and heat gunned the shrink stuff on:

At each stage, we were using the ohm meter and magnets to make sure that the circuit was still working. Here's a couple pics of the final (so far) get up plugged into the rock band drum set, in which you can see the reed switch lying on the blue drum pad:

I know this is child's play for a lot of people here, but in case other people are as dumb with electronics and magnets as I am, and want to do this anyway, i figured I'd put a more detailed how-to up.

I tried playing the base part of Creep on practice mode using magnets and the reed switch in my hand and it works fine I think. It's responsive enough so far. I'll know for sure once I get a pedal/pad and hook it up to that. At that point I'll also figure out how many of the 6 little magnets I'll want to be using.

Thanks SO MUCH to Reldan for this idea, and of course to my dad for making it possible for me ;-)