JimmyM
Diamond Member
Jim Mothersbaugh went on from the early days of Devo to become a big instrument designer at Roland, and was part of the team that created MIDI. But back in these days, he created an electronic drum set using a practice pad set, some Barcus Berry piezo pickups, a handful of white noise generators he built from old PAIA kits, gates and frequency filters to isolate different frequency ranges for each drum and cut noise when not playing, and some guitar pedals. These are the two best known early tracks with Jim.
So I got to thinking in my insomnia driven thoughts that I have an old Remo practice pad kit, a couple piezos hidden somewhere, a computer with Cakewalk, and a handful of choice plugins. Certainly it must be way easy to tap into the power of computers and do a recreation, so I'm going to try just micing up a pad and treating the signal with plugins to see what happens. If it works out, I'd like to do it in real time and eventually make a full setup.
I know enough about recording on my setup to do what I need to do, but I never need to play on live instruments and use the plugins to treat the sounds in real time so you can hear the output as you play. So if anyone can clue me the best way to do it in this little experiment, I'd appreciate it.