Custom drum pad construction

[lost decade]

I am going to build a custom drum pad consisting of two copper plates facing each other to act as a transducer to conduct current when hit. This comes from Thomas Henry's Electronic Drums cookbook.

Has anyone ever constructed his or her own drum pad? Basically, right now mine is layered like this, (from top to bottom):

top
copper clad board
conductive foam
copper clad board
bottom

Ideally the pad would fit into some sort of 4 in wide x 4 in long container with a durable top (some kind of rubber or hard plastic). Does anyone have any recommendations of enclosures or housings to try?

 

[Enzo]

Have you looked at commercial electronic drum pads? That might be informative.

It has been maybe 20 years now, but I used to regularly service such pads. I think maybe mostly Yamaha, but some Roland as well. If I recall, the basic pad was a disc of plywood, with a sheet of rubber/vinyl padding on the face. A piezo disc was glued on the reverse side with wires out to a jack. The voltage spikes from the piezo triggered the drum electronics unit.

Yours is a variable resistance maybe?

 

[lost decade]

I used to have one of those SynSonics pads, which I think used some type of variable resistance to affect the voltage they sent to the VCO. Yes, mine will be variable resistance. The two copper boards will form a transducer that can have different "intensities" depending on how hard you strike it and how much foam I put in between the copper boards.

I have some rubber shims that I think are going to make good pads and I'll put the copper beneath them. The tough part is getting a good material to put between the copper that isn't too resistive. Thomas Henry's book recommends using the foam that ICs are packaged in.