This Kickstarter Could Change Drumming For Life

This is going to be a game changer. For decades there have been electronic drums. They have- For the most part, been lousy. In recent years, the sound banks used for electronic drums have made leaps and bounds of progress, but the triggers have still fallen short. The rubbery pads feel nothing like a real drum, and the subtleties and nuances that drummers can get out of different striking techniques get lost in the poor trigger design. This is a step in the right direction. Non-Binary acoustic/digital hybrid electronic drums. This is going to be a must have for any drummer wanting contemporary sounds on a live set. This is going to add a new element to your drumming with a natural and organic feel. Take a look at what these guys have put together, and feel free to chip into their kickstarter campaign to get this idea off the drawing board and into our music venues!   As music goes increasingly digital, live drummers are becoming an endangered species. So much of today's most experimental and cutting-edge beats come out of samplers and pads of hip-hop and EDM. Drummers who still want to get the feel and subtlety acoustic drums can provide have been at a loss for ways to mimic those sounds. However, we may be about to bridge that divide. A new technology from new music tech company Sunhouse called Sensory Percussion introduced Wednesday on Kickstarter may prove to revolutionize electronic drums. Using new trigger and signal technology, the device allows drummers to manipulate the sounds of their existing drum set and rearrange them into any shape and texture they can imagine. This may be the technology that finally marries digital and acoustic drums into a single instrument and will hopefully bring flesh and blood drummers back into the limelight. "The mission is to bring drumming into the 21st century," Tlaceal Esparza, founder of Sunhouse and drummer for ARMS, Friend Roulette, El Topo, the Dave Harrington Group and sometimes Nicolas Jaar, told Mic. In his eyes, the product is an effort to preserve drumming as a physical artform. "I want to empower drummers to create more and fit the new music and start feeling like they have control again," he said. "I want to bring back the drummer's primacy in rhythm making." He notes that live drummers have largely become novelties in pop, hip-hop and EDM, replaying beats that were not composed or recorded on drum sets. He finds this reality disappointing. "There's a real genius to the physicality of playing real drums and the kinds of musical phrasing," Esparza said. "And the ways in which you can think through rhythms is very unique and very powerful. The idea is to take that and make that work with digital sounds." How it's different: Most traditional drum triggers function along a simple binary, on or off. You hit X drum, you get X sound. But acoustic drums do not function in these black and white terms. Striking the [...]

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