Introduction: Project 1 Music Programming by Matt Kuntz, Elias Ananiadis, Hallie Koches, Rem O’Connell

Have you ever wanted to play the drums but have no drum set to play with? Well we have a surprise for you. Through using the MakeyMakey and connecting it to the Max8 software, you are able to create your own drum kit and play any sound you can think of.

Supplies

In order to make your own drum kit, you'll need the following supplies:

  • MakeyMakey
  • Aluminum foil
  • Tape
  • Marker (For noting which sound is which)
  • Max8 software
  • Laptop or Computer
  • Drum Sticks (recommended)

Step 1: Prepare the Drum Kit

First, make aluminum foil drum pads by folding a piece of aluminum foil over until it is a square size of your choice. Then, connect your aluminum pads to the MakeyMakey wires. You can make as many drum pads as you want as long as the programming you are using has enough functions to support the sounds you would like to achieve from the pads. Once the pads are connected to the MakeyMakey, spread out each pad and tape them down to the table around 2 inches apart from one another.

From there, sync up the sounds from your software to each pad and test to make sure sound is coming through. Finally, label each pad to the corresponding drum sound it makes. For example, we labeled our kick drum "K" and our snare drum "S."

Step 2: Prepare the Software

The software we used for this project was Max.

The Max project consists of a “key” object, which reads input from the keyboard. The “select” object acts as a switch statement that splits the input signal depending on what key was pressed. Those different inputs map to the different drums, kick, snare, closed hi-hat, open hi-hat, and crash cymbal. The signals from the select statement go through to buttons, which will light up when the signal is received. The buttons here are arranged to represent an actual drum kit, with the big blue kick drum, orange snare drum off to the left, the hi-hat even further to the left and the cymbal to the right. The signal flows through the buttons and then out to number statements that feed into the “makenote” object. The 'makenote" object creates a midi message that will be sent to the synthesizer, but first is sent through a flush statement, which sends NOTE-OFF messages when the sound ends.

Finally, the "noteout" statement takes the midi message created with the "makenote" and flush statements and sends it to the synthesizer. (In our case, it is the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth that comes standard with Windows.) If the midi channel is channel 10, this causes drum sounds to be heard instead of a pitched instrument like a piano or organ.

Step 3: Wire It Up

To hook up the inputs, route wires from the WASDFG set of connections on the back of the MakeyMakey to small foil pads. Hook the alligator clips from the ground connection on the MakeyMakey to the foil that wrap around the tips of the drumsticks. When the drumstick hit a foil pad, the circuit is completed and the corresponding key (either W, A, S, D, F, G) is sent to the “input” node of the Max project. Our project had the following mappings:

G - snare drum

F - kick drum

D - closed hi-hat

S - open hi-hat

A - crash cymbal

Step 4: Play Away

Once each of these steps is completed, all that needs to be done is to run the Max project, and hit the drum stick against any of the foil pads and it will act as though a real drum had been hit!