http://www.tapdrum.com/
It’s been around for several years. There is an AOL homepage from 1999.
The guy who runs this is named Urip Wisnuardi, I think he’s Indonesian. He also sells OEM GPS modules.
A Tapdrum board accepts up to 8 analog inputs from piezo sensors (or whatever–you could feed audio into it if desired), from which it generates MIDI note and velocity data. More than one Tapdrum circuit can be daisychained together to obtain more than 8 inputs….video here.
Anyone built this? Share your experiences.
I was going to build something similar like 10 years ago, but once I figured in the time and aggravation it would take for me to complete the project I decided to just bite the bullet and buy a Zendrum. But yeah, piezos wrapped in quick-dry epoxy and cut up mouse pads, stuck to a 2×4, that’s an awesome way to go.
I’d worry a little about chaining controllers together over MIDI. You’re probably introducing about 1-2ms of latency per hop. It would be great to find a DIY kit that would make 24 piezos do MIDI in some basically programmable way, powered by batteries. I think PAiA has something, but I’m not sure how much power it needs, or how programmable it is.
It would be kind of funny to see a 2×4 with 12 big pads on it all wired up with a big ass snake to an old Alesis D4. That’d be pretty cheap too.