In the present study were analyzed, characterized and classified different types of drums and electronic trigger-to-midi converters on the market in order to implement, where possible, functions not yet available as the recognition of different objects on the drums, their spatial location and reading of the movements on the drums.
The battery is a percussion musical instrument, born at the beginning of 900, consisting of a set of drums and metal plates of various sizes. It is the evolution of some tools that were once played individually by several musicians in band and orchestral contexts. We can consider it as the product of the fusion of several components brought by musical traditions related to cultures from different regions of the world: the military snare drum, the Chinese small-diameter drums, the drums played by hand swing and Chinese and Turkish dishes. All components of the drum, with the exception of plates, belong to the class of membranophones, that is, instruments that emit the sound through a stretched membrane (in the case of a battery of synthetic leather) that is beaten with sticks, brushes or flying. The birth of the drum is usually traced, as we know it today, with the spread of jazz in New Orleans in the '20s and '30s when there was a need to bind it to a single musician who could, using hands and feet in coordination between them, to play different instruments simultaneously. However, despite the different components, the battery is considered as a single instrument. In the '60s and '70s, the rock drummers began to expand the drum set up to modern configurations rich of tom, dishes and many accessories. The same didactic instrument to this day have been extensively developed and became very complicated and requiring the player a complex process of coordination. Since the '80s onward electronic drums with synthesized sounds have developed that created the sounds unplayable for traditional drums. Very often, electronic sounds have merged and integrated with traditional ones, in other contexts, however, have been replaced, creating original music very popular in modern music. There are drum machines on the market consist of pads (rubber surfaces or other materials, which replace the traditional components) that can be played as if they were real acoustic beat. The drum machine works like this: Each pad is assigned a sound that reproduces the original acoustic drums. Each pad is connected to a control unit, the brain of the drum machine, with which you can assign the sound, change it to suit your taste and needs and then use headphones or a facility for listening. In principle, the operation is still valid, but the evolution that has characterized the electronic drums in the last decade has been amazing, so it is sometimes difficult to tell if a song was played with a drum machine or sound. In order to understand this topic was appropriate to context, even historically, this tool. In fact we started from the first drum machine, following the evolution to the current models, with the dual purpose of understanding the operation, and assess any possible improvements. From this information has been extrapolated and investigated the technologies used, and as a result of improvement actions have been proposed.
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