Drum Pads

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Hey.

Four drum pads ready to go.

All made of old mate­ri­al found in the Alt/Lab ins­tal­la­ti­ons, and a very spe­ci­al big thankxxx for Móni­ca who brought the casings (we are going back to that in a moment) for the drum pads.

So the idea was to make drum pads that we could hook up to a sound card(or wha­te­ver) and them make swe­et music, this is a very nice com­bi­na­ti­on betwe­en pie­zo­e­lec­tric com­po­nents and a few layers of some absor­bent sound  mate­ri­al like rub­ber or cork foil (that’s what we use becau­se the­re was nothing more) and a pie­ce of alu­mi­num foil for a gre­a­ter drum area .

We use an old can (20l) of paint, four pie­zo­e­lec­tric found in elec­tro­nic junk like old modems and old telepho­nes, wire for con­nec­ting the pie­zos, cork foil for insu­la­ti­on the drum pad area and Móni­ca sup­ply the casings (squa­re rub­ber cd´s stands), and glue for put­ting everything nice and tight .

First we cut a pie­ce of the can (cir­cu­lar about 10cm radius)and we glu­ed the pie­zo into it, then we dril­led one hole into the rub­ber casing for the wires to came out, them we cut two squa­re cork foil parts (the first in the bot­tom of the casing and the other for the top) a bit of glue and that’s it drum pads ready to rock.

Now we got some audio coming out of the pads but thats just boring becau­se its always the same and we want to go further like trans­for­ming audio into midi mes­sa­ges, and we found the right tool for it, its cal­led  “KTDrum­Trig­ger” and he trans­forms the audio sig­nal into midi notes, we can use this midi notes insi­de a sequen­cer pro­gram to con­trol any kind of ins­tru­ment (either VSTI or some other stuff), in our case we use the drum pads to con­trol “Bat­tery” and thats it ins­tant fun.

The­re are some other links and some other ide­as for drum pads. This “one“uses ardu­nio as a sour­ce for the imput signal.

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