I’ve been long interested in foot drumming as a way to add beats to the songs I play in my acoustic duo without relying on anything pre-recorded. I used to do that with bass and snare stomp boxes, but found out that constant tapping was not healthy for my feet, so I stopped. Recently I decided to get back to that practice using proper electronic drum hardware in the hope that this would be easier on my feet than stomp boxes. Now I have a perfectly working foot drumming setup that includes BeatBuddy. After a month or two of infrequent playing, my feet began to act up again so I’m not sure I’ll continue (I may try replacing each trigger pedal with a combination of a pad and a regular bass drum pedal which could provide better “cushioning”), but at least I can describe this setup for folks who are interested in the same. A couple of pictures are attached below.
Here are the components I use:
- Roland KT-10 drum trigger pedal x2
- Roland TM-2 trigger module
- BeatBuddy drum machine
- BeatBuddy MIDI cable adapter
- MIDI cable
The connections are straightforward:
- The outputs of the two KT-10s are connected to the trigger inputs of the TM-2
- The MIDI Out of the TM-2 is connected to the MIDI port of Beatbuddy via the MIDI cable adapter
Without any further configuration, I can trigger the bass drum on BeatBuddy via the 1st trigger input of the TM-2 and the snare via the 2nd one! It’s really that simple. I can’t notice any latency, so it must be very low (I’m quite picky about that). The KT-10 drum trigger pedals are very well made, sturdy, and responsive. A real quality product. The TM-2 is simple, inexpensive, and effective. You can use TM-2 even without BeatBuddy; it has stock sounds and you can add your own using a memory card. To me, however, BeatBuddy sounds better and is more flexible; for example, TM-2 doesn’t support velocity layers, even though they don’t matter much for my own crude playing. As a possible alternative to TM-2, consider eDrumIn, a 4-channel trigger-to-MIDI converter. People in the know say good things about it, but I haven’t used it personally. This way you can trigger more sounds on BeatBuddy.
Whatever the future of my own foot drumming, I hope that this can help people who do one-man band stuff etc.
