Groove Garage

This diddy is similar to others before, but I’m excited that it’s using the pickups rather than the contact mics. The powered speaker is having trouble handling the separate outputs of the instrument clearly, so I’m only using one output in this test. I may need to amplify each channel independently.

I’m very excited to get the bass mounting together. I’ve temporarily used some cardboard taped to the drum head as a triggering mechanism. It works great! I’ve been having a lot of fun running it through effects this session and am anxious to start adding it to my sonic palette!

Sure. Why not?

Aside from wiring up the jacks and potentiometers, that’s pretty much it for this prototype!

Glued, sanded, prepped, and stained. Tie Fighter gray, the most industrial color in the universe!

I came up with a method for gluing the slats. I tape them on the exterior so that when you push the sides, it compresses the joints together. Then I made a channel that the assembly presses into.

After filling several unwanted experimental orifices, I sanded the epoxy filler down by taping a belt sanding belt to a flat surface and running the slats over it.

I’m going to try wiring these four single-coil pickups in series, white-to-black-to-white-etc. I have no idea if this will work. My wiring guy is stuck in Oklahoma City and I’m a drummer, dammit!

I mounted the four guitar pickups today. Hopefully, I’ll have them wired up by next weekend and can try them out.

I installed the guide rails for the movable frets and chamfered the floating inverted bridges so they only contact the strings at one point. These additions should eliminate a lot of string buzz.

I started work on the guide rails for the movable bridges. They’re .125” thick acetal (machinable plastic) milled to .500” wide. Once I figure out the final bridge positions, I’ll cut them to length and add countersinks for mounting to the soundboard.

My most complete realization of the Drumbas yet. The rhythmic part is the strings on the right processed through the Electroharmonix Super Ego, Mel9, Earthquaker Devices Arpanoid, and the Korg R3’s arpeggiator used as timed gates. The clangy pipe sound is the strings on the left processed through the Line6 POD HD500. I love 1:07 when the foot snare kicks in.

Here, I’m using MIDI to sync the tempo of an Eventide Pitchfactor pedal to the gates of the Korg R3 arpeggiator.

A local rental place runs a lending library for guitar pedals. Dangerous.

This is an experiment using the Korg R3’s arpeggiator as a rhythmic gate. Im planning on having the bass guitar that’s triggered by my bass drum run through something like this to create very accurate and complex patterns over the top of the drumming. The start and end of this is the kick pattern from Front 242’s “Quite Unusual” which I’ve always wanted to cover.

A simple Cure-ish sounding tune, but a real breakthrough for the Drumbas. The right side is going through ElectroHarmonix SuperEgo and MEL9 pedals while the left is going through a Line6 Multi-Effects unit. The contact mics still bleed over pretty bad, but the whole setup is getting more useable every week. A friend is playing quiet bass in the background.