Alternate piezo usage

[sirsam22]

This is not a bass related post, but I am betting there are persons here with the expertise and knowledge to point me in a direction. I play at a church that has a musician development process. One of our drummers had an idea to create a gauge that measures drum stroke velocity or impact on the heads.

The idea is to have a piezo buzzer on a bass with some foam mounted under the heads of an acoustic set. Wire that to a small numeric gauge that would show how hard you’re hitting the head. To get really fancy, could you hook it to a midi and computer to collect more info like consistency? Would you need a buffer or filter?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

 

[lz4005]

You're reinventing the wheel.
Put a mic on the drum and run that into a DAW on a computer. The volume will be displayed as either a waveform or a simulated VU meter.
If you need to do it more quietly, use a commercially available MIDI trigger. Every one of them transmits velocity data on a 1 to 127 scale for every hit to whatever controller it is attached to. Again, easy to display using existing equipment.

 

[sirsam22]

Thanks for the feedback. I hadn’t looked into if something already existed. I’ll pass that along.

 

[Bob_Ross]

You're reinventing the wheel.

...or at least reinventing the electronic drumkit. Some of the cheaper models really are nothing more than a piezo transducer on a slab underneath some foam and rubber "heads"
Plug the output into the trigger inputs of, say, an Alesis DM5, and it will convert your playing to MIDI note on with velocity.