Drums

Anyone sharing a home with a musician will appreciate advances in technology that make for quieter practice. Roland's latest addition to the V-Drums line is claimed to deliver "the lowest playing noise in the history of electronic drum kits."

The world's largest music gear expo is set to open its doors next week, and Yamaha has popped up early with a groove machine called the Seqtrak that could have jumped straight out of Teenage Engineering's design playbook.

Around this time last year, as part of its 50-year celebrations, California's Drum Workshop announced the upcoming release of an acoustic/electronic drum set featuring wireless triggering tech. Now the DWe convertible kits have officially launched.

Back in the late 1960s, creating music anywhere was made much easier with a now iconic toy-like pocket synth called the Stylophone. Now Dubreq is aiming to do the same for beat makers with a portable drum machine.

Drum kits take up a lot of space, and are very noisy. The Aerodrums 2 system, however, allows drummers to practice in silence using just a camera module, foot markers, and a special set of drum sticks – no actual drums are involved.

Created as a visual element for stage performances, the latest project from Love Hultén is an audiovisual sculpture called Slagwerk-101 – a set of percussion instruments driven by MIDI-controlled solenoids.

One of the downsides of playing drums in a band is having to haul a kit around. Full acoustic kits are awkward to carry and take up lots of space in the van. The Drum Roller has been designed to help.

If you haven't seen the choreographed Japanese drumming known as Taiko, then you're missing out. It's loud, dynamic and fast-paced fun. Roland is looking to capture some of that traditional fire and bring it to modern percussionists with the Taiko-1.

​Cardboard is generally used as packaging, to house new instruments during transit for example. But we've seen a number of gear innovations actually built using cardboard over the years, and the latest to join the cardboard band is the Beatbox, a MIDI drum machine built into cardboard housing.​

Redison hit Kickstarter in 2017 with connected sensors that gave drum sticks a voice of their own. And now it's hoping for a repeat of that crowdfunding success with the Senspad, which wirelessly connects to a smartphone running an app that puts a kit at your disposal.​

​Signal Snowboards notes the integral role that music plays in boarding, and has previously demonstrated its love for mixing the two in cardboard with a snowboard and a Stratocaster guitar fashioned from the packaging material. Now the company has made a working drum kit using cardboard.​

An innovative percussion instrument has launched on Kickstarter which kind of puts a full drum kit on your chest. The KeyTam features a main drum where the head tension can be adjusted in real time using a lever on a wooden handle, and a number of mini cymbals for tambourine-like accompaniment.