Category: News

We’ve finally put together a short video of drummers trying Aerodrums at our NAMM booth. Apologies for the sound quality, we didn’t record anyone’s performance from within the program. There was no time for this: people just sat and played for the first time. Plus we were true to our “quietest kit at NAMM” slogan: we had the tiniest sound system there…

We’re sorry we don’t know everyone’s name, but here are the names we know in order of appearance: Pitti Hecht, Liberty DeVitto, Brad Davis, Cobus Potgieter, Jeremy Davis, Tony Snow, Victor Salazar, Casey Cooper and DJ Ravidrums. Thank you all for dropping by, it means a lot to us.

For people who would like to purchase Aerodrums but have a computer below the initial requirements, we have released a patch to enable drumming on computers with slower graphics cards. This patch means you do not need a “dedicated graphics card” anymore. Please refer to the manual’s foreword for instructions on how to get patches and updates. We are now working on Mac and MIDI support and will announce availability dates soon.

Finally, Richard has posted another cover using Aerodrums and some footage from a jam he had when he met up with his guitar-playing brother after NAMM.

We had a great time at NAMM getting dozens of drummers to try Aerodrums. It is now available.

Here’s a photo montage, thanks to all who dropped by! Your response was fantastic.

Click on the picture to see it full size (you might recognize a few famous faces).

Due to the apparent lack of rebound, drummers we talk to are often skeptical about how good it will feel to play Aerodrums compared to a real drum kit. We made this short video to show that existing hand techniques are readily applicable to Aerodrums.

The video features Conor Guilfoyle’s Doctor Beat drum solo, here is a video of him performing it. You can find a link to his transcription of the solo in the description of his video. (If you want to see how it looks in Aered you can click here.)

Thanks to the exclusive focus on drum notation, Aered’s interface is simple and straightforward: As you move your mouse cursor over the music, you see a real-time preview of what the notation would look like if you placed a note there, including automatic placement of rests, beams, stems, flags etc. You can therefore place notes with single clicks and be certain to achieve your musical intent each time.

Here’s a video overview of Aered. Starting from the 1:16 mark you can see the ease with which a drum part can be transcribed from scratch.

Aered is available for Windows PC. You can give it a try and, if you like it, purchase it for a price of your choice. (If you purchase it, the promotional blurb you can see in the top right in the video goes away).

Aered’s main additional features are:

• What you see is what you get interface
• High quality audio playback
• Export to PDF
• Export audio playback to sound file
• Import ASCII tab files
• Fluid rendering, letting you smoothly pan and zoom anywhere

If you were intrigued by our live music transcription demo, please note that this first version of Aered does not yet contain the ability to automatically transcribe music drummed with Aerodrums.

We are thrilled to announce that we will launch Aerodrums at NAMM 2014. We are also a little scared as this will be our first NAMM. Here is a teaser video illustrating some of Aerodrums’ advantages:

We will release more videos and details about Aerodrums in the run-up to NAMM.

We are excited to announce that Aered, our sheet music editor for drummers, will be available for download on this website from Friday, January 10th, 2014.

Here’s a video overview of Aered. Starting from the 1:16 mark you can see the ease with which a drum part can be transcribed from scratch.

Aered will be available under a “pay what you want” pricing model.

In a few days we will post a teaser video revealing Aerodrums, our air-drumming instrument. Come back soon, you won’t be disappointed.

In our old air drumming proof of concept the drum kit was fixed in space, like you’d expect a real drum kit to be. But we quickly realized that the motion capture studio made it very simple to attach the kit to the drummer (think multi-tenor marching band drummer).

We just had to make the system track a few markers on Richard’s belt to recover its position and orientation. Then we could place the drum kit relative to the belt.

Here’s a video of Richard doing some crab-like moves while drumming.

We think it would be fun for bands to use this to let the drummer perform like the other members, rather than stay seated, hidden behind a pile of hardware. Imagine AC/DC like stage antics where it’s the drummer having the fun.

That’s an idea for later though. Aerodrums isn’t going to let you jump around like this, but that’s a price we’re happy to pay to let you carry it in your backpack and set it up quickly in a small space.

At least if you use Aerodrums for a gig there won’t be a drum kit between you and the audience.

Producing good quality music notation is a difficult process. As a result, sheet music for drums is expensive and/or hard to find, and often only available in print. Over the years, ascii tabs have emerged as an expedient to share drum parts over the internet, but many drummers find them frustrating to sight read. Here is a side by side comparison of a bar written in ascii on one side and music notation on the other:

C  |x-----------------|
Hh |--x-x-x-----------|
S  |----o---oo-ooo--oo|
B  |o---------o---oo--|
   |1 + 2 + 3 + 4tl+tl|

Tools have appeared to make the ascii tab experience less painful. For instance, Dtab lets the transcriber place notes on a grid to skip having to type the ascii in a text editor, while TabTrax also aims to assist drummers in converting the ascii into music notation.

Many computer tools exist to help musicians author high quality music notation. They are ambitious programs that aim to provide the flexibility needed to produce a complete score with possibly many different instruments. This means that their user interface is very complex, resulting in a steep learning curve. Here is a screenshot of Overture, a popular score authoring program. Other prominent tools of this kind are Finale, Sibelius and Guitar Pro.

A consequence of the power of these interfaces is that they are very complex to program, maintain and support, leading to prices that are often not affordable to non-professional musicians. One alternative is GNU LilyPond, which bypasses the user interface problem by letting musicians express the music in a programmatic fashion. LilyPond then compiles this code into very high quality sheet music. However, for casual computer users, LilyPond is difficult to approach.

We are making Aered to increase the availability of good quality sheet music to drummers. By limiting the scope to drums, Aered has a simple and easy to learn user interface but does not compromise on the quality of the music notation it produces. It will also be affordable to the tiniest budgets. Our hope is to render ascii drum tabs obsolete by enabling drummers to share sheet music.

In the next posts we are going to go into more specifics about Aered, and introduce website features aimed at letting drummers share (and collaborate on) music parts.

The live transcription we talked about in the last post converts a sequence of drum hits into sheet music representation, where each drum hit describes which drum or cymbal was hit, at what time and how hard.

As an example, the top half of the following image shows some drum hits, visualised on a staff, and the bottom half shows what live transcription produces.

The method decides where to place the rests, stems, flags, beams and dots and how they should be formatted to produce accurate music notation.

My past experience with sheet music editors is that all the decision making is left to the user including, for example, which rest should be placed on which subdivision and where it should be positioned vertically to avoid overlapping other music elements. While this provides the maximum degree of control, it also means that many steps are required to enter even a simple drum part.

So we thought, what is the simplest possible interface that would allow you to enter notes and the answer is that it should not require more than one mouse click per note. What we came up with is an interface where the horizontal position of the mouse cursor defines the subdivision, the vertical position defines the drum/cymbal type and mouse clicking once commits a note to the staff. As the user moves the cursor around, they see a realtime preview of what the music would look like if they placed a note at the cursor position by clicking. What you see is what you get.

The following video shows a very early prototype of Aered, our drum sheet music editor.

Stay tuned for more on what sets Aered apart from existing music notation editors.

I started playing drums when I was about 9 years old. I didn’t have a drumkit at first, only sticks, so I used to play on whatever household surface was nearest to me. I think it was only after enough of the furniture was pitted by drumstick marks that my parents decided to use their holiday savings on buying me my first drumkit, a brand new Premier Fusion 5-piece.

My neighbours were less tolerating of the racket I made with it than my parents. After enough complaints, we finally came to an arrangement that permitted me to play between 4 and 6pm every day. I remember getting up on a Saturday morning and waiting all day long for 4pm to roll around. If my neighbours cars were gone I used to sneak a few minutes of play.

In my early teens I started playing in my first band with friends from school. We would practice every weekend in the bass player’s home. His parents had better plans for their real estate than to host my drumkit, and I didn’t want to part with it during the week anyway, so I relied on my father to provide lifts back and forth. I must have wasted at least an hour every band practice setting up and tearing down my kit.

When I began college, by the time I got home in the evening, everyone else would be returning home from work expecting a few hours to relax. The neighbours would be putting their baby to sleep, etc. It was always too late to start making noise and, for lack of opportunity, I ended up not drumming at all for weeks at a time.

But enough with my life story, in the next post we’ll be talking about the ideas that led to Aerodrums, and about its remarkably non-portable ancestor.