HELP ME RE-DESIGN THE IDEA OF A DRUMSET

Actually, I'm looking at products now I can play with my fingers to mimic an acoustic kit. Really. I think I'll post a query as a new thread and solicit suggestions. Drums are heavy I am old my right leg is weak and I was never that good anyway.
 
Actually, I'm looking at products now I can play with my fingers to mimic an acoustic kit. Really. I think I'll post a query as a new thread and solicit suggestions. Drums are heavy I am old my right leg is weak and I was never that good anyway.
Well that is using a "tool" to help with an issue. Like if you had just one arm. I can see that-so I see a niche to be fair. I'm sure I'll run, into more, physical issues as I age-even more. I like beating on things with my hands but now I can't do that-have to use sticks-it just kills me. Both my knees have torn menisci and my right shoulder is all kind of screwed up-so I baby that, as well as my ribs still crack and roll like an accordion since I broke them in my lat 20s so sometimes when I sit I have to adjust my rib cage. But it all still works.
 
A simple google search will show you that Mr. Maverick actually follows through on design ideas. He seems talented, too.

Surveys are tough to get right, and while this one seems to be lacking, we don’t know exactly what information he’s trying to get, and he said there will be more surveys as the project advances.

Maybe working with the mods (assuming he didn’t) or being a part of the community before asking for help would’ve been a good idea.
 
It's not so much Redesign the idea of a drum set as it is replace the acoustic drum set.

Take buggy whips as an example. Horses were replaced as a means of transportation by trains, cars, and planes. The personal car became the daily mode of transportation, replacing your horse. So, they stopped re-designing buggy whips because they became obsolete and of no use if ya ain't got no horse hitched to a buggy and, instead, you're driving in your car to go visit your family on Thanksgiving.

Same with acoustic drums: in 100 years the'll have been replaced completely by electronic substitutes. My grandchildren's children are going to use an electronic substitute they'll have no tolerance for big heavy drums made of wood that require maintenance, new heads, cases, space in car to lug around to gigs. Just like pianos: the acoustic piano is being replaced. Used to be every keys player showed up at a gig and played the house piano. Same at studios. Now - how many venues still have a piano? Not many. The keys player brings their own instrument they plug into amps and PA's. No such thing in 1947. Acoustic drums as we know them today will slide down that same slope.


Midi Drum Glove

 
Yeah Maverick we are just Goose-ing you some-you have to be pushed to be Top gun. Probably to young to know the reference. We agree on the "questionnaire" issue Oldskoosoul-I think most are crap to. So many problems of honesty, bias, do the questions even get to any point? I had one student who wanted to be a nursing major (her Mom was) and students have to do a research project for the BS degree at the last school I taught. Well she came up with this "study" of stress and basically using questionnaires to address it. Which the questionnaires were hugely problematic. Well I wouldn't have it-hell no there was no study. The chairman was being pressured by parents to accept this crap and I dug in my heels. Finally I thought of a compromise that she keeps the questionnaires just we re-craft with definite goals and things we can cross-reference to my suggestion and that was to measure salivary cortisol as a direct measure of stress in the student body being questioned (we had to get approval). Well it turned into a pretty good study and we got great student participation and did ELISAs to measure salivary cortisol-as a reflection of stress that we referenced to memory questions in the questionnaires to-stress affects your memory. But you have to write it like a Master's dissertation which is extremely long reviewing everything from questionnaires to EliSA's to stress to memory etc. But she wanedt to write like a publication short paper (which it wasn't enough data really-more like a pilot study-it should have done at least three times with more students. No student had ever done that all were long bound in library. Her's would have been like three pages-hell no again. The chairman helped write it with her and I didn't even attend her defense of her work. I have no idea what the paper looks like. It's basically like a Masters dissertation and defense-a great experience really. Still pisses me some people are such cowards-I'm not educating parents but students (just cheating the student as far as I am concerned).
 
The only thing I see worthwhile would be a Cone of Silence for drums. A reverse version of Boss noise canceling headphones would work too.
No worries about mistriggers, cymbal feel, tone quality, complaining neighbors. Just all out bliss!

cone-of-silence2-400x279.png
 
Get Smart! what an awesome reference. Agent 13 he'd be in an iPhone nowadays. Agent 99 was attractive but Dr. Steele made me want to a scientist or a dancer LOL. The Craw was ridiculously discriminatory but still funny.
 
I filled-out the survey, but like almost every survey I've seen, it doesn't ask enough of the right questions, and is limited and incomplete on the choices available. I can't imagine what kind of useful information the author will get from it.

Bermuda
I agree. Nothing in the survey would give insight to design reformation.
 
We have autotune for singers. I'm tired of tuning my drums. I want autotune for drums.
 
I Googled SCAD, Maverick, etc ?????????
 
I Googled SCAD, Maverick, etc ?????????
Yes, I was going to be lazy and ask the poster to post a link to show the projects that Maverick has worked on. I’m thinking we’re being fed a red herring. But whatever.
Anyway, years ago I read an interview with Terry Bozzio (I think he was still in Missing Persons so it was sometime in the 80s) in which he was talking about a kit made of light beams where interrupting the flow of light would trigger the sounds. But to me that stops being a drumkit! A man with his technical skills could make something like that sing but numpties like me need resistance and rebound and, well, something I can look at.
Redesign, no, refinement yes.
 
Well a drum is historically, evolutionarily, a hollow physical object that is beat to produce sound. It's really hard to get away from that fact. Now you can reproduce any sound-bass, drums, horns, synthetically technically-but that isn't a drum. It's a device that produces drum sounds. I don't have a problem with ekits but they aren't really a drum kit-the pads don't have to be set up like a drum kit-it's not physically limited as an actual acoustic drum. The physics behind the sound of an acoustic drum and that of an e drum isn't the same. One produces sound waves by a vibrating membrane-the other the membrane vibration converted to an electrical signal by a gauge (a force transducer basically). You could take the strain gauge signal to measure the number or strength of a stroke, or to sound.
 
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The last time an engineer made an honest attempt at this, we ended up with Roto-toms.

Just Sayin'
Hey...I like Roto Toms!:LOL:
Nick Mason of Pink Floyd did too.

As for the topic, go to any NAMM show and you'll see booth after booth of this very thing. Companies trying desperately to re-invent the wheel only to make it the same as someone else, or FAR more expensive than the common bar drummer could ever afford.
Then it's back to square one.
 
I don't see drums ever being replaced by anything, particularly not in live music applications. Certainly not if you want any kind of authenticity to the sound.

You can't really use things like buggy whips, or the horse and carriage as an apt comparison that leads to the conclusion that acoustic drums will be replaced in the same manner. In order to do that, you have to operate under the premise that something will come along that will do it better, faster, more cheaply, more efficiently etc. In the case of the horse and buggy, we ultimately came to the automobile with the internal combustion engine, which came to the modern stage of development in the late 1800s, and was truly modernized with the Model T Ford in 1913. Everything we've done beyond that has been a refinement of the same basic concept, and I don't foresee a time anytime soon where we'll eschew the automobile for something else. What else are we going to find that is going to be better, faster, safer, cleaner, more efficient, and here's the real kicker - less expensive? There have been some inroads with electric cars, but at present it's a competing technology that doesn't really check all of the boxes.

We can go down that road with a number of different things. Look at car tires. We're basically using forms of vulcanized rubber that are filled with air. There have been some advancements in airless tires, but the first practical pneumatic tire was made in 1888.

Bringing this back to the drum kit, in order to replace it with something else, you'd have to come up with something that can do the same job and sound the same, but be better, easier to play, more efficient, and yet at the same time cost less. Current electronic drums are expensive, and at best are a pretty big compromise, never mind the fact (that has already been pointed out multiple times) that the drum reached the modern stage of development with the advent of the Differential Adjusting Rod in 1913, but the basic design of the drum itself, appeared almost 8,000 years ago.

Drums are similar to hammers - it's a basic design that can be enhanced, but they will never be truly replaced with something else.
 
How about inflatable drums. Less space and weight to transport, and the amount of air pumped could change the tone. I know this will work.
 
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