Electronic Percussion Instruments
Electronic Percussion Instruments Fast Facts
Of the four instruments basic to rock music – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards and drums – the drums were the last to go electric. Electric guitar and bass are synonymous with rock, of course, while keyboard synths have either ousted the acoustic piano or at least added greatly to the keyboard player’s range. It remains to be seen whether acoustic drums will go the way of acoustic piano. But certainly there is an increasing live use of electronic pads, while in the studio, drum machines, samplers and sequencers are used as much or even more than acoustic kits. This revolution has taken place in a remarkably short period. Although drum machines have been around for some time, it was the introduction of the Linn LM-1 in the late ‘70s that launched the first serious challenge to the acoustic drum.
A Brief History of Electronic Percussion Musical Instruments
Dave Simmons is a keyboard player who, in the late ‘70s, experimented with analog synth modules played via drum pads. The electronics were similar to those used in analog keyboards, but concentrated on the percussive elements of the sound. The first commercially marketed unit was the SDS 3 drum synthesizer, closely followed in 1980 by the hugely successful SDS 5 electronic kit with its distinctive hexagonal pads.
These pads had a relatively hard polycarbonate surface beneath which transducer ‘piezo’ pick-ups transmitted the timing and approximate force of the players’ strokes to the ‘brain’ of the kit. Here the sound is generated and put out to an amplifier. The hard playing surface has been the cause of major criticism, since drummers unwittingly came to strike the pads with too much force, causing wrist fatigue and worse. The other major criticism is the lack of touch sensitivity and dynamics as compared with the acoustic drum.
Along with expanding the range of available sounds,
Simmons has concentrated on improving the playability of their pads. They
have been closely followed by their competitors, of course. Pads now tend
to have rubberized playing surfaces (Simmons, Dynacord, Roland, Yamaha,
Pearl, et al), or real drum heads tensioned over foam pads _D-drum, Tama,
Sonor). Yet even with real heads, because of the need for a foam underlay,
the feel is not identical with that of an acoustic drum. But the relatively
uniform and firm playing surfaces actually make certain aspects of playing
easier than on acoustic drums.
Touch sensitivity is getting better all the time. It’s now possible to
achieve something approaching a soft closed-roll on certain types of the
electronic kits. Dynacord have devised a system where alternate strokes
trigger a dual sound source so that beats merge into one another during
fast rolls, as they to when played on acoustic drums. This is an improvement
on the ‘machine gun’ discrete effect characteristic of most electronic
kits and drum machines.
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