Has anyone tried rubber rim covers in conjunction with SP? I thought it might dampen the rim’s acoustic sound, but don’t know how it might affect the sensor. Also you might be able to use a small strip of the Pintech rubber to create another zone. Instead of beating on your shell you could hit the rubber.
Yes!
So…they mostly work (depending on your goals for SP) - you will have trouble getting all 10 zones, and they really blur the timbral difference between Rimshot-Center and Rimshot-Edge, as well as Stick-tip and Stick shoulder.
I personally do not like the Pintech rubber rims when they cover the entire rim (since they block the lugs and make it impossible to tune the drums while they are on). But that wouldn’t be a problem if you were just using them to cover a small portion of the rim.
The Pintechs also block a lot of acoustic sound and give the sensor a pretty weak signal from the rim - you can use the velocity IO panel on samplers you have assigned to the rim pads to alter the dynamic range of sounds mapped to rims (so that even quiet hits cause a loud response from the sampler), and I’ve found that to be an adequate solution sometimes.
I’ve actually found that taping portions of broken XLR cables to the rims is a surprisingly good solution to the loud rims problem. I use gaffers tape and can make it look pretty clean nice when I put in the effort. I’ve found this method to have the best ratio between muffling the rims and providing enough signal to the software.
But I have a pet rabbit whose main goal in life is to destroy all my cables (and I often don’t have the energy to fix the chewed XLRs), so I have enough bad cable to complete this endeavor. I’m sure there are other options worth experimenting with.
But whenever I treat the rims with any kind of muffling, I don’t expect to get a good response from the software on Rimshot-Center and Rimshot-Edge, and I don’t expect the software to be able to distinguish between Rim-Tip, Rim-Shoulder, and Cross-Stick. All other zones work fine, though.
So, with muffled rims, I’ll typically skip training on Rimshot-Center and Rimshot-Edge, and then I will train Rim-Tip, Rim-Shoulder and sometimes Cross-stick, but I’ll pretty much always assign the Rims-Shoulder zone to the Rim-Tip zone (and maybe have a controller modulating a sound on those zones, so that the sound between Tip and Shoulder are not drastically different, but there is a bit of nice movement between the two).
@Mason is a heavy SP user (definitely check out his instagram and other social media for some innovative SP ideas: @masonself) and I’ve noticed he often uses some kind of rubber rims , so maybe he can weigh in?
I had a feeling it would cause problems. I’ll use that money towards some wood hoops for my toms then. I usually find them to be a little less harsh and cutting. Thanks for quick reply.