Hasta La Ideas

Maverick creator Love Hultén is turning drumming into a visual art form of sorts! Slagwerk-101 is an audiovisual sculpture that uses a series of percussive instruments and turns them into a physical interpretation of a digital drum-machine. By simply mounting sticks on, which are actuated using a signal board that reads MIDI signals and converts them into real beats, Slagwerk-101 is perhaps one of the most tongue-in-cheek interpretations of the words Electronic Dance Music.

The setup involves individual instrument units that come together in a modular setup. This modular nature allows Slagwerk 101 to expand or contract, and be laid out in a variety of different ways. The individual drum modules include everything from kick drums, to snares, toms, and hi-hats, to even some unusual ones, like the tambourine, a pair of hands (they’re wooden), and a Saturday Night Live classic, the cowbell. Sticks are attached to electromagnetic solenoids, and can be plugged right into individual modules using quarter-inch jacks, and can be routed to the signal board, which translates beats playing from a connected laptop. The result is a set up worth geeking out over. The laptop sends beats to the drum-kit, which play the loops back in real-time with stunning response time… Professor Terence Fletcher from the movie Whiplash would be pretty proud of this machine’s tempo.

Designer: Love Hultén