I just got my tatacon delivered but sensitivity sucked big time. You had to hit the dons and kas with force just to make sure your hits get registered.
These were things that I'd had to procure- so I started thinking
**why do I need these specific items? is it to add hardness to the material? is it to raise a bump and make it easier to trigger?**
Whatever it is, me and my baseless-confidence™ believed that I could imitate their results using different materials.
Luckily, I'm part of a team that does hardware R&D so we have this workbench in the office with materials and tools already setup so off I went to scan the bench for materials I could use.
I saw an electrical tape and thought that it could substitute the rubber sheet material if I just keep adding layers of it to something like paper.
Also, cork? wood?.... isn't paper made of wood? Yeah. That should work.
And that was it.
I decided to open up my drum and see how I'd go about doing things.
The drum used in this mod guide is the original Hori Taiko no Tatsujin switch drum but as long as the mechanism is the same- other drums should be moddable the same way.
**Also, the workmanship of the mod show in the pics is horrible. The tapes were cut as if I only had access to a piece of rock and not some refined steel scissor. I only planned on doing this temporarily but it worked so well that I guess this would be permanent instead.**
Also, the drum was in pristine condition prior to me modding it. It started getting scratches because I dragged it around while opening-closing, testing, and fine-tuning my modifications.
I also used the following but these are all totally unnecessary
- Masking tape, because I ran out of electrical tape and was too lazy to get a new one from the cabinet
- precision tweezer, you most likely won't need this
- mini grinder with a bit that can be used to poke holes into the paper, you can use scissors- I just happen to have one already set-up in the vicinity
Once you've done this to all the knots, you can now slowly separate the top layer of the drum which should reveal the sensors.
#### Step 4 - Add a layer to the thick base foam
By now, you'd see a piece of foam attached to a solid plate. Lift that solid plate up and you should see a thick black foam underneath it.
In most guides, they replace this foam with a 1cm thick cork or wood. I assume they just want to make the material less shock absorbent so my take was to add a layer of tape to each side of piece of paper to harden it then make a cut-out to match the original foam's shape and place it on top of the original foam.
After doing so, on the side of the paper that does not have electrical tape, add another layer of tape. I used masking tape because I ran out of electrical tape and then ended up adding another layer of masking tape to it to make the result thicker.
I did around 5 layers over-all. If you're getting false-positives then you should strip some off. If you want more sensitivity then just add more layers.
