Experimental Instrument Builds

[kneal6]

I'll be documenting my weird prototype builds here, I want to have them written up somewhere online in case someone else tries to patent this idea or something. I'll be open sourcing all the code when it's ready and anyone is welcome to copy these ideas 😀 they're not that groundbreaking or anything but I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anything similar before.

 

First up is something I suppose I'll have to call the AntiBass. It lets you play guitar and drums simultaneously.

 

Each metal bracket is a capacitive touch sensor which triggers a different drum sample. So depending on where you strum, it will trigger Kick, Snare, etc.

Touch sensing and reading the buttons/switches is done via an Esp32 board. Ground is connected to the bridge, and this requires use of a metal plectrum. Strum sensing is very reliable as long as you're touching the strings with your left hand. I used aluminium angles for the strum sensors originally but it didn't work too well. Aluminium basically forms a thin layer of oxidation the second it's exposed to air.

 

I went a bit overboard with the switches. Everything will be controllable with a Bluetooth android app eventually. For now I will use the switches to change drum kits and add cymbals i.e it could play a hihat every strum as well as whatever drum is assigned to that trigger.

 

Drum sounds are played from a Bela board, it's an open source beaglebone Cape. Audio Output latency is about 0.6ms with the Bela. Normal midi latency is about 1ms per note, but I'm using rs232 module at 512k baud. Regular midi is 32k baud so this should be a fraction of a millisecond. I haven't tested the total latency but basically feels instant. Can load any soundfont < 300mb. Has at least 16 note polyphony.

 

I've got it set up as one-drum-per-trigger at the moment, but it could also have a whole pattern per trigger, so you could be playing an entire drum beat by hitting one trigger at regular intervals. Plus, it's just playing soundfonts so it doesn't even have to be drums. It could play 1/16th of an organ loop every time you strum.

 

Still working on the android app for this, there's so many potential features! 

 

NEXT ONE WILL BE A BASS!

 

 

 

[Hellzero]

Check the SynthAxe as you might learn a lot from this rare instrument.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SynthAxe

 

And the way Future Man (who is Victor Wooten's brother, named Roy) is using it as a drum kit with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Man

[kneal6]

Bass time! I realized i don't actually like playing guitar so now I'm planning a bass+looper one man band. 

 

This is a headless bass with touch-sensing thumb rests. Depending on where I rest my plucking hand thumb, it will change my EQ/FX, activate a vocoder, etc.

Only 2 of 3 thumb rests are shown here, they're not installed yet. There will be another one in the middle, forming a continuous line where the B string would be. This is strung with a high C.

No volume/tone controls, pickups are wired straight to the jack output. The top plate has 3 small latching buttons which I will use for selecting presets. So I can access 8 different FX presets, each one with 3 different channels depending on where I'm resting my thumb. The bass signal is going into a Dr J sansamp clone for basic EQ, then into an axoloti DSP board. The axoloti is kind of a reconfigurable multifx/synth board, it has stereo inputs so I'll have a mic in the second channel for vocoder stuff and vocal FX. 

 

The bridge on this is from AliExpress, it was about £100 at the time, but they're like £70 now. Quality seems good, but the knobs are quite hard to turn by hand. They have an awkward little wrench which goes into the side of the bridge but I've made my own replacement one out of a 5mm allen key bit and a wooden disc.

I like this design of bridge, there's no Allen keys involved in changing strings. It came with a headpiece but I made my own with a bit of aluminium z-profile. 

 

Neck is an ibanez sr1825 factory second I got from eBay. I bought 2 of the 5 string ones and one 4 string. £80 each, panga panga(wenge) with titanium reinforcement rods! I'm probably gonna leave the headstocks on the other 2 intact. Body is just a wenge neck blank with a bit of wood stuck on for the bridge.

 

[alyctes]

Interesting., from my entirely ignorant perspective .  Clever trigger mechanism.  The strum/sample trigger feels like the trickiest bit from the user POV, because you will tend to get a single combination of sounds.  Making it programmable is possible, I guess, but that sounds like a can of worms to use live.  For studio stuff it seems fine though? .

 

Could you put a guitar-chord sample on it?  I don't see a reason to restrict yourself to drums

[kneal6]

20 minutes ago, alyctes said:

Interesting., from my entirely ignorant perspective .  Clever trigger mechanism.  The strum/sample trigger feels like the trickiest bit from the user POV, because you will tend to get a single combination of sounds.  Making it programmable is possible, I guess, but that sounds like a can of worms to use live.  For studio stuff it seems fine though? .

 

Could you put a guitar-chord sample on it?  I don't see a reason to restrict yourself to drums

Certainly it will be better for four-to-the-floor type stuff, it'll be hard to do complex hihat patterns and Tom fills etc. I have a couple of arcade buttons on there though so you could e.g. hit the button between strums and that would trigger the hihat to open for one hit. Also I've got the big 3-position switch there so you could have hihats with every drum during the verse, then you flick that down during the chorus and now it's crashes with every drum.

 

There's 5 triggers so you could do

Kick

Snare

Cymbal

Kick+cymbal

Snare+cymbal

 

Flick switch to change cymbal btw hihat and ride

Tap button A to queue "next cymbal is a crash"

Tap button B to queue "next cymbal is open hihat"

 

[Jus Lukin]

-

Edited March 15, 2022 by Jus Lukin

[SpondonBassed]

Intriguing.

[Richard R]

Following with interest 👍