Category: Blog

We’re starting a new feature on social media called ‘Aerodrummer of the Month’.

This gives us the opportunity to celebrate you and the wonderful ways in which you are using Aerodrums! 🎊

For a chance to be featured on our channels, use this short form to share photos, videos and tell us about yourself and your Aerodrumming.

Everyone who takes part will be entered into a raffle with a chance to win an Aerodrums swag bag!

We can’t wait to hear from our amazing, global Aerodrums community! 🌍
– The Aerodrums Team

Hi everyone, my name is Liam, and I’ve just joined the Aerodrums team as Head of Marketing and Communications 👋

I’m really excited to start working to help bring Aerodrums to more drummers around the world. I’m also looking forward to meeting many of you lovely folks in the Aerodrums community along the way!

I’ve got to know Yann, Richard and Maria in the past few months and I share their vision and passion to make Aerodrums as accessible, innovative and fun as possible. Seeing as I’ll be speaking to lots of you in the coming months, it’s only fair you get to know me a bit too. Here are a few things I’d like you to know about me:

First and foremost, I’m a professional drummer!

I’ve been a drummer my whole life and I’m more active now than ever with my playing. I’m in various acts – from a wedding band, to an internationally touring group, to playing alongside a comedian, and much more.

My point is – I understand the life of a drummer. I know what makes life easier when gigging or recording, and what makes a drummer tick.

I’m an Aerodrummer

I was first introduced to Aerodrums back in 2018, when I received Aerodrums 1 as a Christmas gift. I share Richard’s experience of being a frustrated drummer – keen to play, but lacking the space and facing various constraints with noise and neighbours.

Aerodrums was a huge support in keeping me rehearsed, active and enjoying drumming while living either in flats, with other people, or while on the road.

I’m based in the UK

I live in Somerset, UK, which gives the Aerodrums team a kinda triangular shape when plotted on a map. We now work between Liverpool (Yann and Maria), Dublin (Richard) and Frome (myself).

I’m keen however not to make things UK-centric. Aerodrums has a huge international playing base, so we will make every effort to recognise and champion the drumming and communications needs of players across the world.

My background is in marketing causes and support services

Alongside my drumming career, I have extensive experience in marketing, for various charitable organisations across the UK. I’ve worked for organisations, at a senior level, supporting people with their mental health, bereavement, drug and alcohol challenges, and much more.

At first glance there doesn’t appear to be an obvious link between the careers. However I do know (indeed, first hand!) all about the therapeutic benefits of drumming. I don’t think it is talked about enough. Perhaps you’ll see more recognition of how good drumming (and air-drumming) is for your wellbeing in future posts!

(You can add me on LinkedIn if you like).

Say hi!

My aim in the coming months is to make sure the Aerodrums community is heard, represented and given opportunities to fully enjoy and thrive playing Aerodrums.

The first and most useful thing I can do is collate your feedback. So, at the risk of opening myself up to an inundation, I’m inviting you to email me!

• What would you like to see on the Aerodrums website, social media and newsletters?
• How could we be better at bringing you Aerodrums updates and fun content?
• As an Aerodrummer, how would you like to be rewarded in exchange for videos of your playing, and feedback on your experiences?

Let me know: liam@aerodrums.com. I look forward to chatting. Until then, happy Aerodrumming! 🥁

Back in 2016, only a couple of years after we first introduced Aerodrums 1 into the world, we appeared on the hit BBC show Dragon’s Den.

It’s pretty well-documented how our pitch went – in fact you can still see the clip online. Remarkably, it is now 10 years to the day since the episode aired.

Over the years, we’ve received both praise and stick in equal measure for turning down the offers made to us in the Den. Our decision was based on our unwillingness to part with (what we felt was) such a significant share in the business – but also because we were, and remain, reluctant to compromise our values and vision for Aerodrums. 

That is still the case today. Throughout the Aerodrums journey, we’ve turned down many opportunities to make more money, gain more exposure, or other activities where our saying ‘no’ would make other business-minded people think we’re crazy.

There is method to our madness though! We are driving home our message that Aerodrums is not a toy, not a gimmick, but a legitimate, innovative instrument – and here to stay.

To mark 10 years since our TV appearance, here are some insights and fun memories from our moment in the spotlight:

We were scouted 🔎

The programme scouts participants they think will make good TV. That’s right – they contacted us asking if we’d appear on the show!

Both during and since our TV appearance, we have realised that Dragons’ Den doesn’t have that much to do with business investing. The Dragons typically offer deals asking for 20% or more of the business. This is very uncommon for investment in early stage businesses, because it leaves little room for later investors to come in while leaving a reasonable share of the business to the people who started it.

In the real world, businesses look for investors, not usually the other way around. Perhaps our response and decision did make ‘good TV’, but the offer didn’t make good investment sense to us.

Still, we weren’t oblivious to the process. We gladly accepted the invite, and we enjoyed the experience.

A hazy memory 💭

Perhaps surprisingly, Richard has only ever watched the episode back on one occasion!

He describes his memory of the whole experience as “hazy and surreal”. He does however recall the nerve-wracking feeling of waiting for the “lift” before the pitch (which – pssst – is not actually a lift!)

Building a rapport 🤝

Yann was struck by how long contestants are actually afforded to chat with the Dragons compared to what is edited into the show. Yann reflects: “I think it lasted almost two hours from getting in front of the Dragons to walking away”.

Of course, for the purposes of entertainment, the only spicy moments of our meeting made the edit. You may not be surprised to know that they didn’t take up Yann’s offer of going out for a pint!

Lights… camera… action 🎬

It was pleasantly surprising what a good job the production team did to ensure we weren’t distracted by the filming.

There were issues with studio lights in the background not long before we had to start our pitch. We had to fix that at the last minute, so that was a somewhat stressful start to our time in the Den.

However, despite the fact that there was a whole room of people behind and off to the side, in the moment it really felt like just us and the Dragons in a room together. We barely even remember seeing any cameras.

Deal or no deal? 💰

A member of the production team told us just after our pitch finished that our time in the Den had been very exciting for the crew themselves to watch.

They genuinely couldn’t tell if we were going to accept the Dragon’s offer or not!

Blocking out the haters ✋

We actually don’t know what kind of response we had on social media – though we can make a good guess…

For many reasons, mostly because as a then two-man band focused on tech and product development, we didn’t pay any attention to what was being said online.

What was harder to ignore however was the influx from fans of the show rushing to Amazon to flood Aerodrums 1 with one-star ratings. Most of them told us we were ‘owned’.

It’s all character-building…!

Our most successful business year 🏅

We took part in Dragon’s Den primarily because we thought it would be a great way to get more people to know about Aerodrums. And it worked!

Within days of the episode airing, we ran out of the few hundred Aerodrums 1 we had in stock. We had to rush around like a pair of headless chickens, back and forth to the Post Office, to ship the influx of orders.

In the two months following the broadcast, we received preorders worth almost three times the amount of investment we had asked the Dragons for.

We should have anticipated the big response after the episode went live. That year is still the best year we’ve had in terms of sales. We had lots of time to prepare for it, but we still ran out of stock and faced huge demand. Another lesson learned!

A challenging business landscape 🥲

We’ve been in business for 14 years now. It feels like the world is a much more stark place for small businesses now than it was when we started, or since we were on Dragon’s Den.

We share the trials and tribulations of small businesses across the world, and it’s a reason we’re so protective over who has a stake in Aerodrums. Here are two of many examples on how this affects us:

– 30 years ago Google, Amazon and Meta didn’t exist. Now it isn’t uncommon for these companies to collectively take a 30% cut off a small business’ revenue (fortunately this is not the case for us). That’s huge!

– Further highlighting the testing financial landscape, the cost of the parts needed to make Aerodrums is going up and up. In Aerodrums 2, there is a computer that needs a memory chip. Last year that chip cost us $8. This year, thanks to the AI bubble, we will struggle to find it under $30. It turns out OpenAI, nVIDIA, xAI et al want so many memory chips to build server farms and have so much cash to buy them that everyone else is supposed to wait – or suffer price gouging. It’s a constant battle!

A startling stat 📉

The challenges also apply to the brick and mortar retail world too. In the last 10 years, three in every four physical music stores in the UK have closed. That figure regroups musical instruments, sheet music and record stores.

From what we’ve seen happen around us (e.g. Dawsons, PMT then GAK closing all stores), it’s been as bad for musical instruments stores as for wider retail outlets.

Always listening to our Aerodrummers 👂

Above all, it is you – our customers – that we are listening to in designing the future of Aerodrums. We learned a lot from the experience in the Den, but our most important lesson over the years has been to listen to our Aerodrumming community.

We have an awesome community of drummers and air-drummers. It is your feedback and enthusiasm for our instrument that spurs us on to make Aerodrums bigger and better in the future.

Thank you to those who have stuck with us along the way.

We’re delighted to share our Aerodrumming world with you, whether you caught us on Dragon’s Den a decade ago, or are just discovering our instrument.

We’d like to wish all our customers, friends, partners and drummers a very happy new year. We hope that 2026 brings you good health and lots of drumming fun!

At Aerodrums, we’re planning ahead for a big year. We will continue listening to our amazing Aerodrumming community and bring you more innovative, flexible ways to play drums this year and beyond.

Here are some of the areas we’ll be focusing on in 2026:

Bringing Aerodrums 2 to more drummers around the world 🌍

We’ve worked long and hard developing Aerodrums 2 and it finally landed last year to much anticipation; distributed to our loyal and enthusiastic crowdfunder backers (thank you!) We also put Aerodrums 2 on general sale, but swiftly sold out (again, thank you!)

We’re so heartened by the response. It seems you’re loving the new features and tech, and we continue to add new updates in response to your feedback. One drummer called Aerodrums 2 “an amazing customizable experience that you hardly can have when buying drums/e-drums. Well done!”

In 2026 we’ll be building lots more units of Aerodrums 2 and fully launching worldwide – keep an eye on our social media sites for information on availability. We promise Aerodrums 2 is worth the wait!

Improving our communication 📣

We know, we know… we’ve got ‘mad scientist’ vibes. That means, while we’re very hands-on with the tech, and nerdy about finding ways to develop the Aerodrums hardware and software alike… sometimes our communication is lacking. Watch us up our game in 2026!

We plan to make improvements to our social media, website and newsletters – but also more broadly speaking, you can expect more communication and transparency about the Aerodrums product development roadmap and what we have up our sleeves.

Exciting new Aerodrums features

Speaking of giving you a sneak peek – why not start as we mean to go on? We have a number of updates, for both software and hardware, that are tantalisingly close to release. We’re happy to share that in the coming weeks, on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS Aerodrums 2, you can expect to see:

– cymbal choking support
– multiple physical pedal support
– MP4 export support [starting with win/mac]
– new 5 piece kit presets

In addition to these exciting software updates, we’re getting to work on some physical accessories to further enhance your Aerodrums experience, and minigames and fun Aerodrums challenges. More on that to follow!

We’re also (belatedly) working on an Aerodrums 2 manual, ensuring that your commonly asked questions are resolved in a flash.

And don’t worry – our updates aren’t exclusive to Aerodrums 2. We continue to listen to our loyal Aerodrums 1 drummers and will be adding some much-needed functionality, such as 48KHz support.

Developing Aerodrums communities and incentives 🤘

One of the other ways in which we’ll improve our communication and have a more exciting social media presence is by championing the amazing Aerodrums community.

We receive videos of people enjoying and playing Aerodrums on a daily basis. Our social media inboxes (particularly Instagram) are jam-packed full of talented drummers using and experimenting with Aerodrums in a diverse range of locations, styles and often as part of bands or events.

We want to make moves this year to harness the incredible effort we see from our drummers and ensure your Aerodrumming is captured, shared and rewarded. We’re toying with ideas ranging from community platforms, to competitions, to in-person meet-ups. What would you like to see? How would you like to chat with other Aerodrummers? Let us know – email liam@aerodrums.com!

Saying hello in person at events across the globe 👋

We don’t have a full schedule just yet, but we’re planning to make ourselves available for chats, demos and mingles at various events in the coming months.

Some of you may have already seen us at NAMM and the UK Drum Show over the years. We look forward to meeting many more drummers in person and providing the opportunity to get a feel for Aerodrums. We might even pop up in some unexpected places! 👀

What else would you like to see from Aerodrums this year? Do you have a video you’d like to share? Anything else on your mind? 🤔

Let us know by leaving us a comment either here, on our Forum, or social media.

See you down the line!