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My 1st Project - Say Hello to the "Electro Tongue Drum"

The electro-what?

If you've read my previous post you'll know I'm an amateur musician of sorts. I play guitar, fumble with keyboards and have a liking for weird and off beat instruments. Canjo anyone?

One such instrument is the Tongue Drum (aka Tank Drum, aka Hank Drum).


I fancied buying one, but a decent one isn't cheap, so I couldn't justify the cost given the small amount of use I'd have for it. But how about an electronic emulation of one?

I got the idea when I was down the rabbit hole looking at lots of other peoples projects online. I stumbled across the paper piano project. The person who built this simply drew the keyboard on cardboard and filled in the keys with pencil "lead". Those "keys" were connected to a wire using a paper clip, of all things, and the wire was attached to an Arduino Uno micro-controller via a large value resistor. The Arduino can then sense when a finger touches one of the pencilled in keys and play a (horrible sounding) note.

Now this blew my mind! Triggering a circuit just by touching graphite - amazing! Off we go down another rabbit hole looking into capacitive sensing.

So, it came to me that I could try to build my Tongue Drum emulator using touch sensitive keys that would trigger the required note by some means. It strikes me there are two possibilities:

  1. Trigger a sample of a real tongue drum and play it back either through a speaker built into the instrument or via a line output to an amplifier or headphones. Or both.
  2. Trigger a MIDI note and send that via a MIDI port to a sampler or virtual instrument.
Which of those I'll go for has yet to be decided. There are simpler ways of triggering samples - i.e. using a traditional keyboard - but it would be more interesting to use an instrument that resembles the real thing.

Oh yes, and I just happen to have a couple of tongue drum virtual instruments that could be controlled by MIDI or that I can use to create the samples. Well that's a happy coincidence isn't it? Oh look, here's one of them being played by this Alo Phogg chap. I wonder who he can be?

Now, whether or not this is too ambitious for a first project remains to be seen. But I'm going to give it a go. I'm going to take it slowly, hopefully learning as I go. I'll report progress here as the project develops.

Oh, and I have another, related project idea.


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