On Mon, 15 Jan 2018, jonetsu wrote:
A few times in the past, and even recently, there were some comments
regarding the lack of a technology that could translate relatively well
the percussion gestures done by hands.
I'm one for sure.
That technology exists and is quite affordable. It comes from
Standford University and was licensed by Yamaha. The Korg used it to
make the Wavedrum.
Since I connected mine today I thought of doing a quick 'demo', just 1
minute in which:
- fingers are brushed
- nails are brushed
- fingers are tapping
- nails are tapping
- pressure is applied
and variations thereof.
The Wavedrum is connected to the usual stereo tube preamp and
compressor used for acoustic guitar, but with different settings, and
then a bit of reverb was added. The Wavedrum currently has a Remo drum
skin.
Sound On Sound calls it 'true physical modelling'.
https://soundcloud.com/nominal6/wavedrum1
First it sounds very nice. I went looking for some other recordings and
they are nice too. Yes the technology to take the input from a drum head
and pass it to a synth seems to exist, but I do not see any output for
midi, OSC or proprietary control protocol so that the _performance_ can be
recorded and the synthesis done later even using the same synth built into
the wavedrum itself. This makes me wonder if this is true synthesis (which
in my mind means input a voltage, number that has no audio in waveform
itself in it and create the audio from scratch. This system seems to mean
take the audio in and then add resonance, change frequency or other DSP
process that just changes the original sound that comes from a known
drumskin.
So there are two things missing that I see:
1) controlability -being able to record and edit the performance
before it becomes audio.
2) proof that there really is synthesis happening and not just
digital shaping of the original audio.
Neither of these points should be considered a putdown of this technology.
This is good stuff. But rather a clarification of the offered usability as
compared to what I would be seeking. That is, this is not a
controller/synth pair but an electronic drum. (quite a nice one) I suspect
the technology in the DSP could be used quite successfully to come up with
a "MIDI" controlable drum synth. I suspect that it would not be impossible
to have a controller that could send enough information for any one stroke
to enable such a synth to sound very life like. I would suggest one MIDI
channel per drum would work nicely.... editing the midi stream might be
interesting :) So anyway, 16 MIDI drums per MIDI port.
--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net
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