As awesome as digital music production can be, I started to burn out on computers a few years back and began experimenting with ways to create the rich and nuanced sound palette of electronic music in more tactile ways. I wanted to build a drum kit that made the kinds of sounds a drum machine makes, those deep low sub-bass booms and succinct snare snaps, but with little or no digital interface between the instrument and the sound itself. Art mimics life mimics art. A drum kit to sound like a synth made to sound like drums.
The majority of the work I’ve done on this project has centered around one common element, the “speaker/drum”. Just like it sounds, a speaker/drum is a drum with a speaker built into it. Check out this video to see a speaker/drum in action. Here’s another speaker/drum demonstration. Both of these examples work on a feedback loop. There’s a magnet (or magnets) attached to the drum skin. An electromagnetic pickup (like any guitar pickup) is used to pick up movements of the magnet and send it to an amp, which drives the speaker in the drum. When a signal is generated by bringing the pickup within range of the magnet, that signal is amplified through the speaker, which causes the drum skin to vibrate. This vibration is in turn picked up again by the pickup, and a loop is created. The interesting thing is that, unlike the shrill, ear piercing feedback you get from a vocal mic when it gets too close to a speaker, this feedback is filtered by the drum itself. Applying pressure with your hand to the drum skin, the speaker, or moving the pickup will all effect the pitch and tone of the sound generated. The resulting sounds can be surprising, at times rich and reverberant like a cello, at others a growling drone like a didgeridoo or analog synth.
When I stumbled upon this effect I got really excited. The drum-thing I had been dreaming of was coming into fruition. However, it wasn’t quite playable yet. It was good for droning, moaning, soundscapes, but it wasn’t playable like a kit yet. The next step was to make the drum percussive again. Of course, the drum itself was still a drum you could bang on, but the sounds coming from the speaker weren’t the percussive low bass tones I was hoping for. I went through a number of prototypes where I tried to generate a percussive bass tone and feed that to the speaker. At first I built what I called a “Bass/Drum”, which was basically a modified bass guitar mounted in front of a kick pedal. It worked – kinda. The sounds it produced were thumpy and low, but inconsistent and lacking in range. I found that putting the signal from the bass through a low-pass filter created just the effect I was looking for, and eventually found that the bass itself wasn’t even necessary. At present all I use is a contact mic and a kick pedal. The signal from the mic is run through the filter and sent to the drum. Boom boom! Works like a charm.
When you mix all these effects together some real magic starts to happen. The kick-drum goes boom, the magneto-feedback goes wyowyowyowyow, and the drum is still effective as the percussion instrument it was meant to be. Sometimes I further augment the sound by adding delay effects, or adding a percussion synth to the mix. I also cut down some cymbals to 6″ diameter, making the whole setup relatively portable (for a drum kit). Once I got it the whole kit into a single duffle bag and took it to a gig on the bus. It’s still large and unwieldy though, and I’m hoping to hone it down in the future.
This project has afforded me numerous opportunities both in exhibition and performance. I started putting together speaker/drum installations for art-shows like A440Hz and Knock on Woods. These art shows lead to opportunities to build interactive installations for the Vancouver International Children’s Festival and Science World (see the Drumtron 46,000 in action). Most recently, my sound-sculpture “Untitled Drum Machine“, was displayed at the Surrey Art Gallery’s “Open Sound” show where it was put to the test by gallery visitors for an entire year.
Some notable performances I’ve done on this evolving contraption include: Stockhausen’s Ylem with Giorgio Magnanensi and the Vancouver Electronic Ensemble, numerous shows with Spectrum Interview and The Vinegar Factory, and a performance with Corner at last year’s Squarewaves Electronic Music Festival.
Now that I’ve had some time to develop this kit into a playable instrument I want to get into producing tracks with it. For the past couple years I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from music production, favouring live performance instead, but I’m excited now to do some good recordings and polish them up. This is still quite rough, but here’s a bit of a preview of how that might sound.