A car drumset... ?
A friend of mine, Martin P, shared this photo on facebook (source unknown). This led me to the following product idea:
The MIDI driving wheel drum set
Could be produced by: Doepfer et al.
How it would work:
The MIDI controller itself is a cloth with MIDI buttons that can be placed over a driving wheel / over the pedals. Regarding the pedals, light tapping would have to suffice to trigger a sample. No pedal function on the brake, for safety reasons.
This controller would be linked to a set of drum samples which are individually mappable and can be customised / replaced at any time (e. g. for left-handed drummers, custom drum setups people are used to, special cymbals or other special percussion elements that aren't standard).
The audio signal would then be fed to the car's stereo. The MIDI signal could be fed to a MIDI-capable interface to record any performance to a DAW.
There should be a global mute activated whenever any gear and the motor are active, so that playing would only be possible if the engine is turned off or idling. Additionally, incoming phonecalls would need to have priority over the drumset.
As some smart people have pointed out, wheel rotation is an issue. The most convenient workaround could be a bluetooth device to transfer MIDI data to a bluetooth receiver - and from there, MIDI could go to an interface / DAW, and the sound would go to the car speakers, similar to mobile phone calls. Latency could be an issue. However, I am confident that this will get better with newer encoding standards and technology in general improving all the time.
I see a big market here - for people who love drumming but don't bother to build this by themselves.
If you use the idea, please give me credit and show me the product when it is in its final stage.
Thanks.
