I was able to remove the "hoop" piece from the electric kick drum and reverse it so that the bumb was further away from the pedal, allowing the hoop clamp to clamp onto the flat part. Thanks everyone!
Heavier springs offer more tension at the same stretch amount. If you were to try and stretch the regular and heavy spring by 1cm, it would be significantly harder to stretch the heavy spring.
So if you constantly find yourself maxing out the tension adjustment with regular springs, moving up to the heavy spring might mean that you are able to have the spring tension adjustment not as maxed out, or that you can get an even tighter feel than what is possible with the regular springs.
If you want other ways of increasing "tension", try using heavier beaters, setting them to hit the drum at a point higher from the floor, or changing your cam geometry to be heavier feeling (smaller circular cam for strap drives, shorter cam throw for Direct drive).
Alright so I love the dynamic beaters and when I first got my Darwin theh worked like a charm, but now as I play the beater always starts rotating counterclockwise until Today it was striking sideways haha. I have the locking bolts tightened but it doesnt seem to make it better. Has anyone else had this issue or know how to fix it?
Thanks everyone! Yeah, it is genuinely a terrible idea from Roland! Ive have no issue with the Darwin hoop clamp on a real bass drum! I have a serious love/hate relationship with Electric kits...
Alright, ai really like the Darwin hoop clamp, but I have found one small issue:
I regularly play on a Roland TD-27 and the hoop clamp is not deep enough to effectively grip the "hoop" of the kick tower. There is an annoying ridge on the hoop that is just out of reach of the clamp and ends up sort of pushing the pedal away.
It's $225, has an adjustable pedal leverage (like Pearl powerShifter), beater angle, beater height (the entire pedal changes height), and it even hasa similar clamp to the Phantom with the lever closure...
Everywhere I look, I find better pedals with more interesting features. Pearl should be ashamed haha
Ok so at first glance, I thought, "Hey, that kind of looks like a cooler more modern version of the Demon Drives". After a closer look, it lacks anything that would make it an interesting pedal. There are no innovations or improvements over the demon drive. Even the machined parts probably dont make a significant difference. And it actually angers me that they removed the adjustments for the direct drive and the beater distance that the Demon Drive has. It is like making a new type of Vanilla icecream and the selling point is that it doesnt taste like vanilla. It is just so meh. I seriously dont see how they are justifying the price... Both Axis and Trick double pedals are cheaper...
When the Phantom comes out... It should be illegal to purchase this pearl pedal.
(Depending on your setup) I think the initial need for more force in DD might not matter since your feet resting on the pedals could move it into the more neutral range unless you lift your feet above the pedal boards often or play quickly with alot of vertical feet movement. But this all depends greatly on the way the pedal is set up and what position the cam is rotated to.
Right now I am doing my best to get my FTW with DD to feel close to my old Pearl Eliminator with an eccentric cam. I initially rotated the cam quite far towards the bass drum head, which gave the pedal more of a standard chain drive feel, but it turned out to be way to close to the bottom out/dead point and made the pedal lose a ton of power and exhausting to play haha (user error). So I lessened the cam rotation and also fiddled with the footboard height which I found helped a lot (i matched the footboard angle to the pearl eliminators). Im still making improvement and will eventually share my full settings for anyone interested.
Yeah that all makes sense. This is also compounded by the max out point on DD when the connection point of the drive linkage is at it lowest point in relation to the pedal connection point at the end of the stroke. This can happen when the cam is rotated towards the head pretty far. At this point the resistence becomes effectively infinity since all of the force is perpendicular to the possible direction of rotation.
This ability for DD to "bottom out" is a feature in some cases. But it can also cause too much resistance to the point of losing a lot of power at the end of the stroke.
I found a great explaination Dennis had about the differences between strap and DD and also the way DD behaves in terms of cam and my initial thoughts were confirmed. I will continue developing my adjust.ents for my double pedal to see if I can closely match an eccentric cam and post my results here.
It would be great if all adjustments had haptic feedback and "notches" like the new ultimate driveshaft so that beater angle, cam angle, footboard height on strap drive, and cam extension could all be matched perfectly with less room for slight differences between master and slave pedals or for when sharing with other drummers.
Cons: No stepless adjustments. Much hight complexity, higher cost.
Ok, so previously I played chain drive pedals with interchangeable cams (Pearl Eliminators), and honestly the Darwins are on a whole other level of quality and smoothness. And, I love the direct drive. But I want to understand how the direct drive acts in terms of cam shape. The default settings seem like they would almost be a inverse eccentric cam, but Im not sure about that.
I believe it is possible to set up the direct drive to behave similarly to a normal eccentric cam based on cam angle setting, but I need to do some more testing. If Dennis has explained the direct drive action in these terms I would be very interested to hear the explaination.
My approach to replicate the feel of a eccentric cam: On an strap drive with an eccentric cam, the effort is less at first due to the pull point being further away from the rotational axis. As the beater moves towards the head the amount of force needed increases as the pulling point gets closer to the axis. On a direct drive, the pull point is always the same distance from the rotational axis, BUT the direction of pull changes. In order to decrease the force needed at the beginning, the angle between the radius line from the linkage connection point to the cam to the axis center, and the linkage should be close to 90°. This ensures that all all applied force is applied to rotational motion. Then as the linkage point rotates around the axis, the angle should increase, or decrease. Either will increase the amount of force needed to continue moving the beater. This may or may not be 100% doable with any DD pedal, but I think the darwin gives the best chance.
I will do some testing and add my findings later. By the way, I also own the strap drive conversion but I want to do this as an experiment and to better understand WHY DD feels the way it does in terms of things I understand (which is cam shape).
In my opinion a heavier beater is the easiest way to get a heavier feel without having to crank the spring tension way up. Also increase the beater throw by increasing the beater angle and keeping the beater shaft extended as far as possible to increase the perceived weight of the beater.
Also the large version of the Low Boy Wood beater gives me all the heaviness I need haha.
I'm sorry if I missed this info, but will there be black anodizing offered? Im about to receive the FTWs but I am super excited about how this new product will expand your business!