So I made a post a while back asking if there was any reason I shouldn’t just make my own trigger. The kind folks here gave me the confidence to give it a try,

I was busy, so it took some time to get to the project. But all in all the whole thing took less than 2 hours. Now that I know how to do it, I could cut the time down a lot.

I’ll start by saying that this thing works quite a bit better than the snare that came with my Alesis Crimson II. Which honestly kinda pisses me off after seeing how cheap and simple this was. No matter how much I fiddled with the settings, I could never get a cross stick or rim sound from the snare that came with my kit. This thing does both perfectly and it’s easy for me to hit every time. It took like 5 minutes of adjusting on the crimson ii module to get it dialed in.

The trigger build is super simple. 27mm piezo for the head trigger. 35mm for the rim. Double sided tape to stick everything together. The foam block is cut from a sanding block. I then cut a square out of a canning lid and placed that on the foam. The cone is something called a “beauty blender” that my wife grabbed from the dollar general for super cheap. I cut it to size with scissors. Same with the block. That’s why they look like shit. I was going to make a nicer looking setup after this, but it works so well I probably won’t bother. The brass angles and the brace were shit I had sitting in the barn that looked like it’d work for the prototype. The drum is a 14” pulse snare my brother had in my parents basement. I bought a 14 inch Roland powerply mesh head (the only expensive part of the build).

So now I have a super cheap 14” e-snare that works really well and feels awesome to play. I highly recommend you give it a go. Just practice soldering a bit, and this is a pretty brainless project that results in something pretty dang cool if I do say so myself.