Why Aerodrums is unique, and how it works

Drummers all over the world champion Aerodrums as a new way to drum.

Air drumming can be a serious (and in some aspects superior) alternative to electronic drums, and Aerodrums is exactly that – a legitimate instrument.

To play Aerodrums, you use normal drumsticks with light weight reflectors at the tip, and a high-speed camera tracks them to capture your musical intent. You also wear reflectors on your feet for the pedals.

We are constantly doing research to improve our instruments, and soon after launching Aerodrums 1, we investigated whether it would be possible to get rid of the high speed camera. We found that:

1. Only a camera lets you reliably hit the drum you want
2. Only a camera can capture the dynamics of playing the drums
3. Placing electronics on the drumsticks changes their ergonomics too much for comfortable playing

We did this research back in 2016, in collaboration with Intel. At the time they were marketing a wearable motion tracking chip. We worked with a team of their engineers to place a chip in each drumstick to track it.

We and Intel did our best to make it work, but in the end using only the drumsticks wasn’t reliable enough.

We constantly keep up to date with technology, but there hasn’t been progress since then to make us revisit our findings. We’ll say more about that further down, but first let’s get into the meat of the topic:

1. You need to be able to reliably hit the drum you want

With Aerodrums, if you stop your stick tip at a given location, the same drum will sound 100% of the time. That’s a non-negotiable feature of a musical instrument.

But without several external points of reference (like the many pixels in a camera sensor), it’s not possible to track the position of a drumstick tip. You can only track the direction that the stick is pointing towards.

Your phone contains the same kind of electronics to track its direction as the Intel chip we used in our research. Therefore, you can try a little experiment to see how suitable this is:

1. Start a compass app and select the spirit level mode
2. Now, shake your phone for a bit. You will see that it takes a little while for the line to stabilise after you stop.
3. If your phone was as light as a drumstick, the level line would have been off for even longer, because there would have been about three times the acceleration for the same effort. (Because your phone is about 3 times heavier than a drumstick).

Drumming is all about giving your sticks a good shake. So, the electronics often lose track of where your stick is pointing. And what we observed in practice is that the wrong drums soon triggered through no fault of the drummer.

2. You need expressiveness to enjoy playing music

Aerodrums is a very dynamic instrument: you can play loud strokes, very soft notes, and anywhere between. This is because the camera constantly tracks the position of the drumstick tips more than 120 times per second, making it possible to compute the speed of the drumstick very accurately.

In fact, the dynamics of Aerodrums instruments are more accurate than that of some high-end electronic drum models.

With only electronics on the drumstick, we found that this wasn’t possible. At worst, when drumming fast, the only information we could get was ‘the stick is moving faster than we can measure’. And it happened even while playing basic grooves.

3. With only electronics on the drumsticks, some drums had to be played in an awkward posture

Aerodrums includes preset drum kits, with each drum piece placed exactly as you would expect on a standard drum kit. (You can also create your own drum kits and place each piece where you are used to having it).

With only electronics on the drumsticks it was only possible to track the orientation of the stick. But on a drum kit, you often play different drums with the stick naturally pointing in the same direction. For example, the snare and the high tom.

So in practice we found ourselves pointing the drumsticks in unnatural positions to play certain drums.

We also found that reliability improved when keeping the electronics facing upwards (because turning the circuit throws the tracking off even more). A drumstick has a natural tendency to turn in your hand as you play. And if you try to prevent it, you need to grip it tight. But a relaxed grip is the correct way to drum.

4. You need the drumsticks to feel like real sticks

The way the drumstick is balanced and how it feels in the hand is key to drumming. With Aerodrums, the reflective balls can be placed on the tip of any normal drumstick. And they are light enough (a few grams) that the balance barely changes. This helps make drumming with Aerodrums a familiar and instinctive experience.

Even though the Intel chip was very light, it needed a battery to function. We found that this meant too much extra weight to preserve the feel of a drumstick.

Pedals

Even if we had concluded that tracking the drumsticks without a camera was worth pursuing, it would have opened the question of how to implement the foot pedals in a realistic way.

Aerodrums tracks not only your drumsticks but also your feet using a unified approach that provides accurate pedal hit speeds and continuous hi-hat openness. It supports double bass setups and additional pedals that can be customized. You even have the option to use normal bass drum pedals.

We are constantly doing research and development to improve Aerodrums

There hasn’t been any revolution in the type of electronics we tried with Intel. In fact, because chip manufacturers have focused on miniaturisation and power saving, accuracy has remained the same or declined. So our conclusion that the technology is not suitable for playing drums still stands.

There are big companies recently offering products that track an object you hold in your hand. Meta is one, with their Quest virtual reality headsets and controllers. They track hands mostly for games, not for tasks as demanding as playing drums. But they still use cameras to get the job done (they’re on the headset).

As far as Intel is concerned, they terminated the tech (Intel Curie) in 2017, not for lack of collaborators trying exciting things with it.

We focused on developing Aerodrums 2, which we released last year.

We’re passionate about this nerdy stuff, and there’s a lot more we could say, including words like ‘accelerometer’, ‘gyroscope’, ‘drift’ and ‘inertial measurement unit’. If you’re really interested, drop us an email or DM on social media, or to chat with other Aerodrummers you can use our Forum.

We’re so glad to hear from so many Aerodrummers who have found incredibly creative and fun ways to incorporate Aerodrums in practice, learning, performing and recording, all over the world. We hope you’ll consider joining the Aerodrums community.

Check out the Aerodrums Shop here.