Check out the Drum Buddy, an awesome electroacoustic drum machine:
[display_podcast]Only 10 Drum Buddies were made – all in New Orleans, Louisiana – and the one for sale (in the photo above) is serial #1. It is also the instrument which was originally intended to belong to Quintron. He has decided to let this one go and give 10% of all profits to the New Orleans Musician’s clinic.
The starting price is $5000 and the ebay auction will begin on Saturday, Jan. 26th @ 11:59pm and end on Tuesday, Feb 5th (Mardi Gras day) @ 11:59pm All 10 of the Drum Buddies except this one at FRESH KILLS have been spoken for -mostly by New Orleans Swamp Tech DJs. New York City musician Laurie Anderson has acquired one for her band as well as Los Angeles guitarist Nels Cline – famed improve music guru and latest member of the band Wilco.
Story of the New 2007 Drum Buddies
These instruments were naturally updated and improved from the original 2000 Drum Buddies. The cabinets were created by expert woodworker Marvin Hirsch out of 100% old growth or sinker cypress. Sinker cypress (Taxodium spp.) logs are timbers that were lost during transit from harvest locations in the swamps and mill sites during the industrial cypress harvest from 1880-1930. The wood has a bizzare glowing green color with very tight grains and boards can be anywhere from 100 to 1000 years old. This is some of the rarest wood on earth and is referred to as “Louisianna Gold” by local furniture makers. Each box looks quite different. In addition to the sinker cypress there are also cabinets made from old growth blonde cypress and old growth orange cypress – some with a very rustic pecky look. The one being auctioned is a classic Pecky Cypress.
The top and front panels are new as well…These have been designed and created by Mary Waclaw in her shop in Chicago – shiny black acrylic instead of the aluminum of the first run. The electronics have also been vastly improved and enhanced with a master tuning knob, a cleaner mixer, and a thru feature which essentially means that you can now play any instrument (or even sing) THROUGH the drum buddy – like an effects pedal in tandem with the regular Drum Buddy synth sounds.
The guy singing “Maria” is Placido Domingo.
Takes my vote for best use of a single lightbulb.
Incredible use of optical synthesis too… i’ve been meaning to dig into op-amps and photoresistors, i think this may have finally put me over the hump.
I use my drum machine with my computer to produce compete tracks. Dance music is a professional field and it saves a lot of time to lay out complete tracks on a sequencer like Cubase.