I have upgraded my drums to mesh heads, Hellfire style, and though I'd share some images of the process.
This conversion is based on Hellfires "standard" conversion,
as shown in Hellfires stickied thread.
Feel free to suggest changes or clarifications - I'll be happy to update this post.
So - here we go:
You will need:
Tools :
Required: Scissors, drum key, Philips #2 screwdriver, sharp knife, soldering iron.
Nice to have: Glue, glue gun, third hand, tin suction device, pliers, power drill.
Materials:
New mesh head, 2-3mm thick craft foam large enough to cover the drum interior, a bit of tape, soldering tin.
Remove the drum from the drum rack.
Loosen, but do not remove, the screws holding the rim.
Flip the pad over and remove the screws holding the bracket. Remove the wing nut at the end of the bracket.
Slide off the bracket. It may be a bit stuck - if so, coax it with a flat screwdriver.
Remove the jack. Gently. Do not pull hard on the wires. There may be resistors or not. (I had resistors on my 8" pads, but not the 10" ones.)
If the jack is stuck, because of too little slack in the wires, you may have to unscrew the rim screws, dismantle the drum and shift the foam pads to be able to remove the jack. I had to do this on the two 10" pads and the 8" base drum pad.
Unsolder the wires from the jack. This is actually not hard at all - touch the soldering joint connecting he wire and the tip with a soldering iron, and it comes apart quite easily.
The point of desoldering (and later re-soldering) the wires is to remove the wires so that you can rearrange the foam without cutting the foam to pieces.
Desoldering is actually very,
very easy. If there is any excess tin on the wires and/or tips after desoldering - remove it with a tin suction pump - just melt the tin and suck it up.
Desolder and remove the resistors as well - you will not need them anymore.
The point of removing the resistors is that you no longer have to reduce the piezo sensitivity. In the default configuration you have the piezo very close to the drum head, and thus the resistors are there to stop the signal from the piezo being too "hot" for the module. When you perform the mesh conversion, the piezo is no longer close to the head, but deep inside the pad, and thus you can remove the resistors to increase the sensitivity.
(For anyone interested, the were two resistors on the head piezo - one 82kΩ in serial with the piezo and one 150kΩ in parallel.)
The wires are now free.
Unscrew the rim screws using the drum key - remove the rim and the mylar pad.
Disassemble the pad. From the bottom up, the order was: drum base, thick soft white foam, thick black foam, thin foam with steel plate and resonator (resonator plate down), Mylar pad, rim - the foam layers stacked inside the wooden drum shell. The thick black foam may or may not have a hole - it doesn't matter.
(The picture does not show the correct order.)
There may be glue remnants holding the foam pads, wires and/or drum base together when you try to disassemble the pad - if so, carefully cut the glue strains with a sharp knife and trim the excess glue. Again - do not pull on the wires.
To avoid any problems with squeezed wires - drill a hole through the side of the center - we want the wires from the rim piezo to go out where they should without being crushed against the drum base.
..Now isn't that much prettier? Make sure that the wires go in the slot in the base to avoid getting crushed - when we reassemble the drum, all the wires will go through that slot.
Tape some of the excess wire with gaffer (or other) tape - the wires through the hole to the jack should be just long enough to solder them back on - if they're too long you risk jamming the excess wire against the base when reassembling the drum pad later on.
("If you can't solve it with gaffer tape - you haven't used enough!"
)
Let's prepare the foam pads. Using a CD as a guide, draw a circle on the white soft foam.
Cut the foam with scissors after the line you drew on the CD - make sure that the hole is large enough for the resonator plate to avoid touching the foam.
Put the foam plate with the resonator plate inside the wooden shell - if the foam does not clear the edges of the wooden shell - trim a couple of millimeters all around the edge. If the metal plate is decentered - use this opportunity to trim selectively on one side, centering the metal plate.
Note: We're not yet mounting the plate - we're just temporarily placing it inside the wooden shell to check for size.
Now we want to make round craft foam inserts to place below the white foam. We want 3-4mm of foam - Hellfire used a single sheet of 3mm foam - I ended up using two sheets of 2mm foam.
Using the inside of the round wooden drum shell as a template - draw a circle a sheet of the craft foam and cut. When done, cut a single slit toward the center of the craft foam for the wires. Use one slice of 3mm foam or two slices of 2mm foam.
This is how the drum now will be assembled - shown bottom up:
The freshly cut craft foam with wire slit, white soft foam with cut circular hole, thin (trimmed) black foam with resonator plate, thick black foam (with or without hole).
The assembled sandwich - still upside down. (Note: this picture has only one layer of 2mm foam - I ended up with two layers of 2mm foam.)
Trondsters "Bling" version - as I also will be using the drum kit for Rock Band, I'd like to have some extra color in the drum pads. Using the hole in the thick black foam as a guide, I cut a circle from colored craft foam to place in the centre. As I was using my (very rare) Munchkin pen, I also added "+1" - now my drums are not normal drums - they're now +1 drums! Mwhuahhahaa! Uhm - sorry - a bit of dorky nerd humor there..
Stack the sandwich on the drum base. The order is (from the bottom):
Drum base, 2x2mm thin craft foam, white foam with hole, thin black foam with steel plate and resonator (steel plate and resonator facing down), thick black foam. Rotate the resonator plate with the wires towards the bracket.
(I also centered the thick black foam, and glued the small round colored craft foam to the center of the thin black foam.)
The complete sandwich, with two layers of 2mm craft foam and mesh head:
From the bottom up: Drum base, two sheets of 2mm craft foam, white soft foam, thin black foam with resonator plate, thick black foam, mesh head.
Special consideration for the kick drum:
As the kick drum is a bit of a special case, with several people reporting good results from adding a mouse pad at the top of the kick drum stack, closest to the mesh head, I decided to add some extra craft foam at the top. Using the inside of the wooden drum casing as a template, I cut a circular slice of 6mm craft foam and put that on top.
The stack for the base drum is thus, from the bottom up:
Drum base, one sheet of 2mm craft foam, white soft foam, thin black foam with resonator plate, thick black foam, one sheet of 6mm craft foam, mesh head.I tried the above recipe, adding a thick layer of foam on top of the kick drum. It did
not work well - I ended up with a dead spot in the middle of the drum, where hits not always were registered - this worked particularly bad with a special silenced beater - I found out that it was worsened by my way too high retrigger setting.
Solution: I changed the kick drum, changing it to a "normal" conversion, with some extra foam at the
bottom of the stack, just like the other pads. And it worked
much better. Now my kick drum can handle anything I throw at it - even double beaters.
Kick trigger settings:
I strongly suggest using a log curve for the kick - keep the retrigger, sensitivity and threshold rather low - I'm currently using log4, sensitivity 18, threshold 35 and retrigger 20.
I tried having using a spline curve and higher threshold and retrigger settings, and got mistriggering - hard hits with the beater that did not register in the module. A log curve, along with lower threshold and retrigger values, solved those issues.
Make sure that all the wires go in the slot in the drum base, with no risk of getting squeezed against the drum base.
Gently slide the drum shell over the sandwich (it might be easier to remove the thick black foam when doing this). Make sure that the shell lies on the drum base itself, without any craft (or other) foam caught in between. Make sure that the thin black foam with the resonator plate is centered, and is not touching the drum shell.
Add the thick black foam. The top of the foam should be slightly above the edge of the round drum shell.
(The purpose of the thin craft foam at the bottom is to elevate the stack - it does not matter if it is 1, 2 or 3mm thick - the foam dense enough not to sink into the drum base as the white soft foam did.)Updated: I first assembled the pad with the stock Mylar heads - I had ordered mesh heads, but wanted to convert the pads before the mesh heads arrived. After using the Mylar heads for a short period of time with only one layer of 2mm foam at the bottom, when I opened the pad to mount the proper mesh heads, I found that the top of the foam had sunk down to the rim. Because of this, I decided to have not just one, but two layers of 2mm foam at the bottom. The foam should press up against the mesh head for the best possible pad performance, and it seems that 2mm was a tiny bit too little. Well - it
could be that the Mylar heads were compressing the foam more because of a tighter fit, but in any case I decided to go for 2x2mm foam at the bottom.
It's time to put this baby back together. Put the head back on. If there is a logo on the mesh heads - remember that the bracket is facing up on the regular drums and facing down on the kick drum.
As well - add the rim and fasten, but not tighten, the rim screws. (It is much easier to loosely assemble the sandwich first, rather than trying to hold in together with your hands when turning it over.)
Turn the drum pad over - let's solder her up. Solder the wires in the correct places. When soldering - try, as Hellfire says in his video, to solder the wires straight up from the jack. In particular, make sure that the yellow and red wires are not soldered facing away from the blue wires - you'll have a hard time putting the jack back in its slot.
Soldering done.
Using Hellfires pro tip - add a dab of glue with a glue gun, covering the solder - do not add much glue.
Slide the jack back in its slot. Make sure that the wires lie flat, and won't interfere with the bracket.
Slide the bracket back on - make sure that you do not squeeze any wires. You may also have to push the craft foam a bit out of the way to slide the bracket properly in. If the resistance is soft, it's the foam, and if it is hard, then it's the screw you must guide through the hole in the bracket.
Insert and fasten the two screws for the bracket, tighten the rim screws and add the wing nut. The pad is now reassembled and is ready to be installed in the drum rack.
Whohoo! Mesh heads!!!
Caution: If you have converted the bass drum head - do not use a felt beater, as it will damage the mesh head. Turn the beater around to the rubber side of the beater:
Never ever use a felt beater on a mesh head - it will melt, fuse with and eat into the mesh head.
However - if you add a drum patch to the mesh head, you can use a felt head as much as you like, as long as the felt beater is hitting the patch and not the mesh head.
Conclusion:And is it better? Will a newbie like me notice any difference?
The answer:
A resounding
YES!!!The pads are
so much more quiet, and the feel is
way better. And the crosstalk, that I already had reduced quite a bit (calibrating with the hellfire converted pads with mylar heads still on)? Gone. Just gone. Now I can actually
reduce the crosstalk settings!! I guess this is because the resonator plate and resonator plate foam no longer is on contact with the wooden casing or a stiff mylar head transmitting vibrations - mmmh.
To compare the sound - here is a clip comparing my two Hellfire converted 8" pads - one with the stock mylar head, and one with a mesh head. This is a fair comparison - the pad sounded about the same both before and after the conversion, as long as the mylar head was still on.
I had to use a constant volume level when recording, and thus my voice is a bit low - when I used auto audio leveling in my first attempt, the camera compensated for the change in volume, rendering the comparison useless.
And - I
am hitting both pads just as hard - it only
sounds like I'm hitting the mesh heads with a fraction of the force I'm using on the mylar heads..
Soldering:Soldering is really not that difficult - this is a short YouTube clip from me soldering the two blue wires to the jack.
Read this:
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-solder/Always keep the tip of the soldering iron coated with a thin coating of tin. If it's burnt and dirty, the tip won't transfer enough heat, and the tin won't even melt.
If you need to strip new wire - give the tip of the newly stripped wire a thin coating of tin before soldering - it will make it much easier.
Heat the items you'll be soldering for a few seconds and then touch the soldering tin to the items you are soldering to melt the tin - not the soldering iron itself. If you only touch the tin to the iron, and the items you are soldering are not warm enough, you will create an unreliable "cold soldering joint".
Remove the tin before removing the soldering iron - otherwise the tin might get stuck to the soldering joint.
If there is any excess tin - melt the tin and use a tin suction device (or braided copper wire) to suck up the excess tin before making the actual solder.
Cheers, and happy DIY'ing!