Typing With A MIDI Drum Set

[Autuin] picked up the drums at the age of 18, but by his own admission he’s no [Bonzo], [Buddy Rich] or [Ringo]. Practicing always seems to fall off the end of his to-do list, and there really is only one way to Carnegie Hall. One thing [Autuin] is really fast at is typing, so he figured he could improve his drumming skills by banging a few paragraphs out.

The core of the build is a Yamaha DTX drum module, a MIDI-to-USB adapter, and little light coding. Basically, [Autuin] made a chorded keyboard out of his drums; by hitting one (or two, or three) drum heads at the same time, he can type characters in Open Office.

For going outside the comfort zone of a steady rock beat, we’re thinking [Autuin]’s build might just be useful. He’ll be displaying his Keyboard/Drum mashup at Vancouver’s East Side Culture Crawl alongside a horrible device of artistic merit. If you promise not to break anything, drop in on him in a few weeks.

Vidia after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERSP-g7Qr1c&w=470]

8 thoughts on “Typing With A MIDI Drum Set

  1. So is this opensource? I WANT THE CODE. I’m sure we could write some sort of driver that would treat it like a normal keyboard and work with any application that will run on the platform.

      1. Revisiting this code. When I have time I’m going to try and covert this code to work with something other than X11, since my primary platform is Mac. Also, assuming this handles only basic characters, I’m going to try and get it to cover everything you might need to use it to write code. And in fact, to use it with VIM. This would help to merge my day-job/practice-time/exercise which would be awesome. If anyone would like to help, let me know.

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