How can I use a pressure sensor to detect drum hits for my lighting rig?

[vk6kro]

I just realized sort of a problem with some of the suggestions (obviously not any ones fault but mine for forgetting to mention this)
When drummers play, the pedal doesn't always go back to starting point since we keep our foot on the pedal. i also sometimes try to keep the beat by slightly moving my foot which makes the pedal move, but not necessarily hit the drum. There are also times, where I actually keep the beater of the pedal touching to drum.
I also sometimes hit the pedal then immediately leave the pedal to go to a different pedal or something like that where it would make the pedal sway back and forth.
So now that I think of it, the photogate idea and switch idea might not work. So the sensor can't really rely on any pedal movement (unless anyone has another idea). But the way I see, the sensor needs to rely on the actual hit of the drum

Seems like you could use an accelerometer on the pedal shaft.
The actual position would then not matter but a large shift in acceleration in any direction could light the light.

These are available as small printed board modules for a few dollars on EBay.

Possibly a bit of overkill, though. You would need a micro to read the accelerometer.

 

[HowlerMonkey]

drum trigger that inputs to a midi device.

Once the data is in the midi realm, there should already be devices that will actuate switches from a midi datastream.

 

[Baluncore]

I would attach a small electret microphone to the frame of the drum, follow it with a high pass filter and a threshold detector. That would detect the step impulse from a drum hit but not the lower amplitude drum resonance or other sounds present in the local environment.