Bass kick on TD-6SW not triggering consistently

[pianograd99]

I am the worship pastor at a church, and we installed the TD-6SW Roland kit back in February. I have 3 drummers - all very seasoned and good drummers. None of them like the electronic drums, but we didn't have a choice with the type of auditorium we have.

We're having problems with the snare and the bass kick. The snare seems to be double triggering if that makes any sense. (I am not a drummer at all, so it's hard for me to know what to say or do with them.) I read on the forum about crosstalk, so we're going to look into that for the snare.

However, the bass kick is missing sometimes. We went into a section of a song in performance with just vocals and percussion, and the bass drum was missing every 5th or 6th hit. I understand the polyphony issue from a keyboard standpoint, so is this probably what's causing it for the kick drum? If the decays are set longer, does that carry over into the polyphony.

Someone please help an ignorant keyboard player trying to fix a drummer's problem.

[Colquhoun]

The snare sounds like a "mask time" issue. Not sure how it is set on the TD-6, but I'm sure you can find it in the settings. Basically, mask time is the amount of time the module will ignore a second hit. By increasing the number, you will remove the second hit. Only raise it up just until you solve the problem, because too much mask time will force the module to ignore hits you WANT to be registered. This is usually more of an issue for bass drum triggers. The problem lies with the fact that by increasing it, you may cause problems when trying to perform rolls or other fast hits on the snare. Hopefully, it will be solved by changing the crosstalk settings.

The bass drum sounds like one of a few things. First, make sure that the beater from the pedal is hitting directly in the center of the bass drum pad.
If that's ok, it may be a sensitivity issue. Increase the sensitivity for that pad, so that a softer hit will still trigger the bass sound easier.
Finally, the mask time may be set TOO HIGH on this pad, and too many hits are being ignored. If the sensitivity setting doesn't help, try REDUCING the mask time on the bass drum in the module.
Good luck!