Engineering a better drummer?
I’m not sure Def Leppard would have been the same had this existed. I can remember watching their music videos and being amazed their drummer could keep up. But still, how great is it that people can keep doing what they love doing musically after a tragedy?
Here’s the article I’m referencing
One of my favorite parts of this design is the potential randomness of the third stick. In making music, sometimes it’s the little accidents that turn into great ideas. The potential happy surprises that could result here could make a lot of bands very happy. It gives me an idea that I might start playing with, how to introduce randomness into a song, but still keeping it musical to minimize unhappy surprises.
In this case, keeping the third stick in time with the music was probably a bit of a challenge. If all music were played at the same tempo, it would be easy to simply only allow hits at certain intervals. Drummers specifically change their style of playing frequently during different parts of the song, it must have been an interesting process to solve.
So now I think I want to figure out a way to integrate some of the ideas here into my percussion foot controller. (While there haven’t been any updates, I anticipate having a ‘finished’ prototype this weekend for both controllers). Maybe a ‘random’ hit generator that calculated the probability of a hit based on the time and frequency of the triggered hits? This should be fun!
