Gearfuse

These fully customizable percussion coffee tables will soon render games like Rock Band a thing of the past. Designer Tor Clausen crafts these in his studio in Olympia, Washington. The drum table has a large variety of re-arrangeable inserts that mimic many percussion instruments and comes in four different sizes, the smallest of which accepts four of the smaller instruments and the largest table accepts sixteen. The percussive components that can be added to the table include (but or not limited to): tambourine, snare, cowbell and three levels of bongo.

Sure, there’s a fun time to be had by all, but eating on it is a bitch.

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This project kit is only meant to help get you started but it’s not short on features. If you’ve wanted to create your own SynthAxe-like percussion instrument, just like Futureman from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones did, then this is a great place to start. You’ll need to add your own piezo sensors to use as triggers and can even use audio input to control it.

How does it all work? Glad you asked:

The Tapdrum kit coverts 8 analog inputs to assignable MIDI notes via an Atmel 89S8252. The inputs are intended to be used with piezo sensors (optional with kit) but could foreseeably use a number of different sensor input types, even audio as Deviantsynth suggests.

From the video, this looks like an absolute blast. Don’t feel like building your own? Use a software-based drum machine.

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