New Music Gear Monday: AeroDrums Air Drumming Instrument

We've all played air drums at one time or another, but what if those motions in the air actually did play something? Now you can with AeroDrums.

AeroDrums is a MIDI controller that uses a pair of special sticks and foot attachments that allow you to trigger sampled drums from either your own library or from a supplied library with Gretsch and Pearl samples. The only difference is that you're hitting air instead of pads.

It's all based on motion capture technology. A bright light illuminates reflective markers on your sticks and feet and a high speed camera tracks the motion of these markers and determines when sounds should be triggered in response to their movement. On your computer screen there's a diagram of where the drums and cymbals are so that you hit the right spots, but drummers seem to acclimate quickly to it to where they don't need to look after a short time (see the second video below).

It also has a high degree of accuracy so the drummer can play ghost notes or heavily accented notes since it measures the speed of your sticks/feet. As a result, there's a full range of MIDI note velocities and continuous controller data is utilized. In the case of the included samples, 16 levels of openness are provided for the hi-hat with up to 58 different samples for each degree of openness and for each hand. Unlike electronic drums, Aerodrums is able to tell which hand you're hitting with and will trigger different samples for each hand.

Aerodrums has been tested with Reaper 4, Garageband 10, Ableton Live 9, Logic Pro X and Digital Performer 8 so far, but the company doesn't anticipate compatibility issues with other DAWs on the market.

The package comes with sticks, two feet controllers, a high-speed camera, and paper sunglasses (since the measurement light might be too bright for some users). The software and library, which work on both Mac and PC, is then downloaded. It's just $199 directly from their website.

Check out the videos below.

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New Music Gear Monday: The O-Bow

Controllers just don't get enough love. In the hands of an expert, they can really bring a MIDI or virtual instrument to life. A good example is the O-Bow, which is short for optical bow. It's a way to achieve some real life string articulations using a real bow. While is this still a prototype (the 5th one actually), it holds a lot of promise. Below is a very short clip of the latest version, but here's a link to a longer clip of the first prototype that shows a bit more of what it's capable of.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

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New Music Gear Monday: MACHINA MIDI Controller Jacket

People have been hitting their bodies in rhythm for centuries and until recently, have relied on good-old fashioned acoustics for amplification. That's not easy, considering that these bags of mostly water that we call bodies don't resonante particularly well.

Now comes MACHINA, a MIDI controller that's actually a wearable jacket. The unit isn't on the market yet, but has a Kickstarter campaign to get the ball rolling. Check out the video and tell me if you think it's cool or not.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.