freedrum - for reals air drumming

I've been thinking a lot about drums, drum pads and how to get some sort of tactile drumming experience to my home studio which is basically an IKEA shelf, so both actual analog and digital drums are pretty much out of the question. This leaves either keyboard drumming (the situation now) or some pads a la Yamaha DTXM12 (which I also probably don't have the room or cash for).

So on a whim I googled "smart drumsticks" and turns out some Swedish hackers have actually managed develop sensors that you stick on the drumsticks and then you can pretty much just swing the sticks and your laptop or phone will catch the Bluetooth MIDI signals and generate a sound.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freedrum/freedrum-the-drumkit-that-fits-in-your-pocket

I'm terribly missing playing real drums so this seems like a really good way to get a more or less OK solution for recording drum tracks to my stuff. I think this could easily be paired with Addictive Drums or whatever the top of the line drum synths are nowadays to really get some nice results. At worst it seems like an easy way to record rough placeholder tracks.

Does anyone here have any experience with this technology already? This is some 21st century stuff. :)

It's a cool idea, but how do you know where to hit? Where is the resistance of a drum head to play rolls etc?

not a drummer but seems it would probably worsen a pro's technique - but if you can do MIDI might be handy for intuitive small loops or fills

would a drum pad not be just as effective?

I think it's certainly a different technique, but it shows in a couple of videos that you can still play on a practice pad or whatever other surface, so it's not necessary to bang at thin air.

  On 10/24/2017 at 1:53 PM, modey said:

It's a cool idea, but how do you know where to hit? Where is the resistance of a drum head to play rolls etc?

I think there's an accelerometer inside, so the "zone" or whether you get a hat, snare or tom sound is determined by the rotation and angle of the stick. I'm pretty sure this sort of dead-reckoning style spatial mapping will lose accuracy within 5-10 minutes of more intensive playing though. I'd probably add 3 bluetooth sensors to the kit so if you set them up sort of like the x-y-z axes of a cube, then the sticks can always do 3-d triangulation to know their location and you should get a much better accuracy.

They say the basic kit is meant to integrate into Garageband, so I guess there is hi-hat, bassdrum, snare, crash, 3 toms and a ride.