Synth drum pads are little more than fancy wrapped piezo sensors. They've gotten fancier with layers and stuff to log delays and compute touch sensitivity, but it sounds to me that you would be perfectly happy with something that just sends a trigger to a sample bank. It's not at all that hard to mine piezo disks from dollar store toys and noisy greeting cards. This is easily within your budget or even that of a collection of pals on a lark on the mall. Mount the piezo disks on whatever you'd like to pound on and "Ta Da!". The *hard* part is to design a circuit that makes "piezo trigger" = "midi trigger". Like that's hard to do when you have friends who are circuit designers. Heck you could probably cannibalize some thrift store or pawnshop acquisition to do that if you didn't feel like building it yourself. Of course you could always simply send the raw signals directly to a mixer, and simply amplify whatever noise these things make. That would be different, and dirt simple, but maybe give you some of what you want. I kinda suspect that you kinda want the sound of a "kit" tho.
So start small and build up over time. Start out just amplifying the whatevers and upgrade to "home made Midi triggers".
(no subject)
Synth drum pads are little more than fancy wrapped piezo sensors.
They've gotten fancier with layers and stuff to log delays and compute touch sensitivity, but it sounds to me that you would be perfectly happy with something that just sends a trigger to a sample bank. It's not at all that hard to mine piezo disks from dollar store toys and noisy greeting cards. This is easily within your budget or even that of a collection of pals on a lark on the mall. Mount the piezo disks on whatever you'd like to pound on and "Ta Da!". The *hard* part is to design a circuit that makes "piezo trigger" = "midi trigger". Like that's hard to do when you have friends who are circuit designers. Heck you could probably cannibalize some thrift store or pawnshop acquisition to do that if you didn't feel like building it yourself.
Of course you could always simply send the raw signals directly to a mixer, and simply amplify whatever noise these things make. That would be different, and dirt simple, but maybe give you some of what you want. I kinda suspect that you kinda want the sound of a "kit" tho.
So start small and build up over time. Start out just amplifying the whatevers and upgrade to "home made Midi triggers".