We had a beautiful time at the Manchester Jazz Festival at the weekend with The Sub Ensemble. It was my first trip to the festival and I was really impressed with the outdoor stage in St Ann’s Square. Normally you’d expect an outdoor audience to be milling around and drifting in and out. On Saturday we were treated to a seated, very attentive audience which was fantastic. It was great to be playing with Mike Fletcher again (as well as all the other guys of course!) We also had a fantastic kebab at Kebabish on Wilmslow Road on the way home too which rounded off a perfect gig! We’ll be doing one more gig this summer at Jazz Club @ The Rainbow in Birmingham on the 26th August so hopefully catch you then.
I got back to Birmingham just in time to catch Bobby Previte and Benton C Bainbridge’s Dialed In at Supersonic (great festival - check it out). I loved Bobby’s use of sound and the way he was manipulating it. I’ve been recently writing music for a project which will be using sampled sounds which I’ve been turning into keyboard instruments using Logic’s EXS24 sampler. The Dialed In set made me want to include some of my sampled sounds in the drum patterns of the music I’ve been writing.
With that in mind, I went looking for a solution to my problem. The obvious thing seemed to be to use drum pads to trigger some of the sounds, but I really didn’t want to buy a whole electric drum kit. I stumbled across this article describing a way to build your own drum pads. Being the practical (and skint) sort of guy I am, I thought I’d give it a crack - more on this in future posts.
I also need a “brain” to turn the messages from the pads into MIDI so that the sampler will understand it. I thought about buying a drum machine (like the Alesis DM4) to do this for me, but again, I love a challenge and money is tight! I started looking around for a way to build myself something to do the job and stumbled across the Arduino which is an open source electronics project. I ordered one straight away as well as this kit to convert the signals from the pads for me.
Obviously I needed something to house it all in and began prowling round the house looking for a suitable box to use. I couldn’t find anything that belonged to me and I didn’t need anymore so I decided to pop to the shop and buy a tupperware box. Sadly, when I tried to put the holes in disaster struck! Not to be put off, I had another look round the house and found the box my Mighty Mouse came in. It’s the perfect size, although I’m not sure Apple designed it with my needs in mind, and it turns out that it’s fairly resilient to having holes cut in it.
I’ll be writing more about this project as it develops and the successes and failures that come with it. For now here’s some pics of the first stage of the Mighty Mouse Drum Box!
So far so good…
Oops!
The Box:
Holds up ok this time
End of part one, just the soldering to do!
Tags: Arduino, chris mapp, Drum Trigger, Kebabish, Manchester Jazz Festival