drumThing performance

Today was our performance of the drumThing. We set it all up at around lunchtime (thanks again Benji for your help) and had enough time for a couple of run thru’s. We had a bit of a scare with the quality of the audio but we found that was due to the weight of the leads pulling on the jack in the socket. Moving the laptop back from the edge of the desk and twisting the adaptor round soon fixed that. We were presenting late in the day mainly coz we stayed in 212 and didn’t realise that there was a running order in the other room until after everyone else had signed up. In the end that was probably something of a result coz with just 5 of us in there, the room was getting pretty hot so with the rest of the guys crowded round, it would have been worse.

The performance itself went well – Jamie has really got the hang of playing the drumThing and I think I managed to add delay and feedback at the right moments as well. Also being a drummer, Stu had a go at it. After some explanation from us on how it works, and me disconnecting the delayStick to make it easier to play, Stu started up. Considering he’d never played the drumThing before, I thought he did well. He took a while to start the recordings off but managed to make some decent noise out of it.

Below is my documentation in pdf format, the drumThing MAX patch plus the text version for downloading (released under the Creative Commons licence as at the bottom of the page) plus 3 Quicktime movies of various performances. Apologies for the file sizes of the movies, this was to ensure the audio was of a high quality.

Download documentation

Download the MAX/MSP drumThing patch

Download source text file

Quicktime movie of us playing the drumThing 33.3MB

Quicktime movie of us performing today 23.2MB

Quicktime movie of Stu playing the drumThing 12.4MB

The drumThing

So, we’ve got a name now and it’s Drum Thing, although I like it as drumThing. And, if that’s not enough, we’ve also decided that we want to do a performance on the day and not just show a video. We will still submit a video from the other day but after chatting about it, we reckon people will get a better feel for it if they see and hear it in action.

Finished?

Well, Jamie and I have had a really productive day. Stuck all our little patches together into various sub-patches of the main, um, patch. Had a few practice runs and then did a couple proper run thru’s. What was interesting about today was that after being pretty sure that we wanted pre-recorded samples included such as backward cymbals, we’ve decided to drop them. Although the controlling of their playback was just as straight forward as the recordings made during the performance, they just sounded completely out of place with whatever Jamie did. As the “output” is more important than the technical side of the project, we both agreed they should be dropped. Unfortunately, we haven’t got any recordings of this so you’ll just have to take our word for it. Right, we still need to edit the video properly to pull out the best bits for submission but it’s all looking promising so far…even if we still need to come up with a name!

Jamie’s drum kit

Discussing tactics

Us in action

2 sticks

Finally had enough time to sit down and put my 2nd stick together. Although it was never gonna take a lot of time, there always seemed to be more pressing things to do with our project. I followed the same design as before; I stuck 2 pieces of card together to form a cross which would hold the array of tilt switches in place, cut 4 slits in one end to hold the card with some tape to help keep them in place. I also cut a slit at the other for the cable to feed out. So, they’re both done now. They each generate different key values so there is no chance of them interfering with each other. Now onto some patching.