Way Beyond Triggering

After one of the most spectacular Kickstarter launches, Sensory Percussion has gone from the drawing board to some high-profile drum kits, pushing the boundaries of electronic percussion.

DIGITALDRUMMER HAS watched the development of Sensory Percussion from crowd funding to software updates and it’s been an impressive path. So the next logical step was to test it and see what the fuss is all about.

What’s in the box?

When you buy a Sensory Percussion trigger (yes, they’re sold individually), you get the ‘sensor’ which looks like an external drum trigger on steroids, a plastic positioner, a pack of tiny adhesive magnets and software download voucher.

You need to register the sensor to access the software which is quick and easy to download.

Besides the hardware and software included in the purchase, you’ll also need a phantom powered audio interface and microphone XLR cables. If you’re planning to run a full system of four sensors, you’ll need an interface with four powered inputs – not the most common configuration out there. There are plenty of four-input boxes, but most only have phantom power to two of them. And you can’t plug these into a drum module – they are actually microphone-type pick-ups and only work with the Sun house software.

Setting up

The set-up is very easy: use the positioner to stick a magnet to the drum head (the sensors work with both mylar and mesh heads), attach the sensor to the drum rim, tighten the thumb screw, plug in and connect to your interface and, thereby, to your computer.

The company has good online resources to explain the set-up procedure, but essentially you need to first set the threshold and then train the software. Much like the trigger-setting approach of the KAT instruments or the aD5 module, you select a ‘zone’ such as the drum centre or cross-stick and hit it repeatedly at different velocities until the software recognises the strokes. The more you train it, the more accurate the ‘triggering’.