Help Connecting Electronic Drum Kit

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Hi all,
Very new to ardour and music in general but a friend mentioned someone here might be able to help and this seemed the most relevant topic.

I recently rescued from a skip a what seems to be a drum kit from 2003. My hope is to be able to give it to my daughter so that she can practice drums as she does not have access to the school ones during the summer.

It has a USB cable. When plugged into an Ubuntu machine I don’t get very far it seems to detect it is a USB device but that is it. Happy to explore further using jack but I will probably need so e hand holding.

When plugging it into a windows machine it sees it as a game controller and if I use the game controller troubleshooter while tapping the different bits I se signals on the joystick and buttons moving or activating.

Sadly I do not have the cd that came with the machine and a search online only gets me as far as finding the manual:
PACIFIC DIGITAL DRUMXTREME USER MANUAL Pdf Download | ManualsLib and that Pacific Digital no longer exists and that these devices or what seems like a similar device during some time were sold by another company.
There is a review article here: DrumXtreme DX-MIDI-Pro Electronic Drum Kit review | MusicRadar

I really don’t want it to go to landfill so I am also willing to give it to anybody that I can take it from south west London. (Pm me?).

I am happy to explore bypassing the “brain” if there is a mixer that might help or even work on an open source project that I might be able to contribute to or start to hack some sort of driver.

I tried finding a the software on an online auction site with no luck.

MIDI Drum recording
#2

FYI, I split this off into it’s own topic rather then necro’ing a 7+ year old thread.

Seablade
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#3

That will make using it without the proprietary software difficult. A modern drum controller would show up as a USB MIDI device so that you could use it with any synthesizer or sampler software. I think using this device would require reverse engineering and writing translation software to convert the game controller inputs to MIDI events.

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#4

Each of the “drums” seem to have a jack that plugs into the brain. Would that be easier to handle?

Is there some sort of hardware mixer that could translate the inputs?

#5

Yes, that is common for electronic drums, the pads have piezo sensors attached which generate electrical pulses when the pads are struck. You can buy drum controllers which have jacks to connect the triggers, but I’m not sure that would be cheaper than just buying an entry level electronic kit. I did find some controllers on Thomann which were much cheaper than I expected, so I guess it depends a little on how much you are trying to save landfill waste vs. just get a decent electronic drum kit running.

A quick search for “open hardware electronic drum controller” did find a couple of projects using the hardware equivalent of open source, so if you wanted to turn your skip find into a hobby project that is a possibility.

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