Air Drumming Percussion Instrument

Product Description

Aerodrums is a new kind of percussion instrument. It enables you to drum without a physical drum kit, by making air-drumming gestures. PLEASE NOTE: Aerodrums requires a Windows Vista, 7 or 8 computer with at least an Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz processor and graphics card ompatible with OpenGL 2.0, or an Apple computer from 20010 or later running Mac OS X 10.6 or later versions; and a Sony Playstation 3 Eye camera. The software is available via download on the Aerodrums site. Aerodrums cannot be used to drum outdoors in daylight. Main features: Very portable: fits in your backpack with a laptop. Silent to others when used with headphones. Musical expressiveness on par with a real drum kit or electronic drums. High sound quality (uses over a gigabyte of high quality drum samples). Flexible and extensible: create and configure your own drum kits, use your own sound samples. Trigger your drum sampler or Digital audio workstation via MIDI.

Features

• 【 Real musical instrument 】 Aerodrums uses a high-speed camera so you can reliably hit the drum you want. Everyone, including us, has failed to make reliable air drums with electronic drumsticks instead of a camera.
• 【 Takes no space | Really quiet 】 Aerodrums is a serious alternative to top brand, full-size electronic drums several times the price. And it is much quieter and much more compact.
• 【 Encourages good drumming 】 It is a myth that you need to hit things to drum. Many drum teachers recommend air drumming with drumsticks. It is natural and feels great.
• 【 7,000+ samples 】 We use that many professionally recorded drum samples. Like on an acoustic drum set, you can play soft, hard, and anywhere in between. And your hihat has many degrees of openness.
• 【 For every drummer 】 Perfect as a first home drum kit and complement to a practice pad. Or as a tool to play more often and longer. Or to record MIDI.

Top Reviews

A fun and novel idea that actually works, but has its drawbacks
by Lunatique (4 out of 5 stars)
May 25, 2015

I'm one of those guys who can't help but play air-drums when a groovy song comes on, and if there are things I can hit nearby, I WILL create a rukus. If you ride in my car, you WILL hear my tapping and slapping the steering wheel and dash. If are in the room with me, you WILL hear me drum my fingers and on the desk and armrest of my chair.

I've been a multi-instrumentalist composer/songwriter since around 1991, and play keyboard drums, trap kit, and Zendrum. I have a Clavia Ddrum 4 system (this was before Clavia sold the DDrum name), a Zendrum laptop model, and more virtual drum instruments/sample libraries than I could ever use. So when I saw a video for the Aerodrums, I just had to get it.

Setting up is a bit of a pain, because you really have to position the camera and your chair at the perfect placement for the system to work well, and it takes a lot of readjusting to finally get everything to work. You also have to move some things around in your room if you have bright surfaces that would interfere with the camera's readings. You also have to make sure you set up a low enough sample rate in your audio interface so there's as little lag as possible, otherwise it'll feel really unresponsive/sluggish.

Once you have all the hardware aspect taken care of, you can start drumming, or you can take a bit more time and set up your own custom drum kit, with the exact kit pieces and positions you want.

When everything's all set and ready to go, you can start drumming. At first you will overshoot your movements and you'll feel like a struggling beginner again, but adjusting to the way the camera reads your movement is a relatively short process, and within the first hour, you should be able to get back at least 70% of your overall drumming skill.

Once the novelty of, "Holy cow it really works!" wears off, you'll start to assess the Aerodrums more critically, and you'll notice a few things:
-The bright light from the camera is really bright and uncomfortable. You really do need to wear a pair of sunglasses (or use the paper one that comes with the Aerodrums) or you'll get a headache from the damn light in your eyes. This is a major negative aspect to the Aerodrum system, and until a more advanced motion tracking system is used, there's nothing you can do about it.
-As fun as air-drumming is, you will miss tactile feedback and the visceral excitement of hitting physical surfaces that provides satisfying rebound. I experimented with using practice pads to provide a responsive surface to play on (for the snare), and they do work very well with Aerodrums, but it kind of defeats the purpose of using an air-drum system.
-In this day and age, we have very compact, light weight, and portable electronic kits such as the entry level Roland ones. They do cost more, but if you can afford it, they'll be a lot more satisfying to playing on than Aerodrums. There are also other small/portable alternatives like Zendrum (or similar products). Again, they are much more expensive, but they are also very high quality products that are very expressive. In comparison. the Aerodrums lacks the satisfaction you get from having physical surfaces to play on.
-Ultimately, I think Aerodrums is both fun and functional, and for some people it can be something they'll play all the time and think of as a serious main instrument. For myself, I think it's more of a novelty that wore off quickly, and I find playing on physical surfaces more satisfying.
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Love these drums
by Jon C. Fox (5 out of 5 stars)
March 3, 2014

I've been a big fan of the NAMM show for years, so I get the latest product release information. That is how I heard about Aerodrums. I bought the system (Aerodrums and Sony Playstation Eye Camera) from Amazon for a total of $178US. It came in 2 days (Am Prime) and I set it up on a desktop Window7 64 bit with i7 and NVidia graphics card. Works great. I've ordered a laptop with graphics card so I can gig with this as I improve my chops. It is both alike and unlike physical drums to play. Mostly, since it appears to have been designed by a drummer, is it like physical drums. Where it differs is that the precise height at which the drumstick reverses direction is not critical - it's as if the height of the drum skin can be where you want it. Similarly, the pedals 'move with me' left-to-right within a limited range. The sound is great, the samples are realistic enough, and I detect NO latency or delay issues.

I play in 3 bands every week. I will introduce Aerodrums at one of my gigs soon, when I feel sufficiently confident and I have my laptop based system functional and I'm sufficiently familiar with it. I think that is the ultimate test - can you gig professionally with it?

I hope to provide a further 'performance-honed' review in the future. Naturally, I'm imagining how the audience will respond - I've had a few neighbors and friends drop by to watch me drum and of course they are blown away. It really looks quite cool to see the apparent consistency and presence of the invisible drums. Now that I'm familiar with the system, I've tried turning off the computer monitor and just playing my Aerodrums 'in the air' only, which has helped my technique - similar in a way to turning off the lights while playing traps or piano or guitar - a good practice to hone one's technique.

For recording, a MIDI output will be great, and this is promised by the developer. But I think this system will work as it is for performance. Of course, as a 'game' or a 'play-around-at-home' kind of thing, it is fine. However, I really DO think it is up to the rigors of public performance! And in case you were wondering, I have no connection at all to the developers, programmers or inventors or the company, and I paid full price for my system.

In a jazz band I used to play in, the leader used to say 'everyone in the band laughs at the drummer' because the drummer is the first to arrive, takes a long time to set up, and is the last to leave because take-down takes so long. Not so with this system, as the 'teaser' video from Aerodrums shows so well.
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Awesome when it works, but some serious (fixable) flaws
by Jake (4 out of 5 stars)
February 18, 2017

I have had Aerodrums for two weeks now and I really enjoy using them. They are a lot of fun and worked as advertised, but there are a few issues that I have that I think could be easily solved:
1. The light sensor attachment to the PS3 camera needs to be way snugger. I have to tape it to the camera for it to stay on without sliding off over time. Any movement of the light sensor slipping degrades the set-up and I have to stop drumming to fix it. This is honestly the biggest problem and I think it would be the easiest fix to make; just make the attachment way snugger!
2. The reflector balls on the drumsticks become immediately loose, which can be annoying. They won't fly off or anything, but they wiggle around and you can feel them move on the end of your sticks. Re-gluing should work, but I wish they stayed on a little better.
3. I am quite tall (6'4") and I need way more space than I thought I would to fit in the frame for Aerodrums to work. It says in the manual one and a half big steps, but I seriously have to be a little bit more than my height distance away from the camera for this to work. So keep this in mind if you have only a small area to work with.
4. Customizing the kits can be tedious, but doing it with the sticks is learnable. However, setting up where the feet go is SO difficult because of how sensitive the trigger is to place the feet. Any movement of your feet will place the pedal as soon as you move it, which is very frustrating.
5. Lastly, when drums aren't triggered, this is incredibly annoying. The sensitivity seems to fluctuate without any change to the environment. However, once you get the set-up perfectly, it's awesome. I just wish the set-up wouldn't degrade so rapidly without any changes to the surroundings, requiring another seemingly arbitrary set-up. I think that it's the camera shifting it's weight somewhat because of the loose light attachment.

But honestly, for what this is, it's an awesome product.

P.S. You will definitely want a headphone jack extender if using headphones as the cord to your computer from the camera isn't that long.
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Super cool idea but difficult to develop "air-drumming" technique
by P. Harrington (3 out of 5 stars)
March 28, 2018

I want to like this more than I do. It's a super cool idea and fun to mess around with, especially when you want to play drums but live in an apartment and have no space and can't be loud. But as a way to actually record music, it's just not precise enough. It's too hard to consistently hit the right place to hit the drum you are aiming for. Like whenever I try to do a tom fill, I end up hitting the cymbals as well.

It could be that I am just not a good enough drummer to be consistent with my hand movements. It is actually harder to play this than a real drumset. That's not to say if I practice on it more I couldn't transfer skills to a real drumset. I'm sure I could, especially double bass technique.

I end up pulling it out every now and then and messing around and I do have fun. But I get frustrated quickly when playing a beat or a lick that should be easy but when you are playing on nothing but air it's not simple at all.

All in all, it ended up not being the awesome way to have a virtual drumset like I thought it would be. That doesn't make it a bad or defective product in any way. Take that how you will. I don't regret my purchase, I just have to keep at it I think.
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Apartment Friendly Drums
by Jeremy Norton (5 out of 5 stars)
November 25, 2016

I am a drummer of 7 years, I've always had a real acoustic kit that I loved to kick. I've recently moved into a second floor apartment that's very cramped for space, I had to sell my pearl masters bcx and planned to get an electronic kit, although after fully furnishing the apartment with my girlfriend there was no room even for an electric kit. I considered my drumming were just on hold for now, until I found this product. This almost seemed ideal for me considering apartment life consists of neighbors all around. On the second floor even a footpedal for an electric kit would tick off the neighbor downstairs who likes to complain, I am a very loud player and very loud with my feet even with no pedal, so I set a pillow on the floor and work the aerodrum pedals on top of it. Totally mitigating the sound and shock from my loud feet. The overal functionality is great, when buying this product you already know that you aren't actually hitting anything, this takes learning a new technique to be able to activate all the elements of your drum kit. I'd say after playing around for about an hour or so I had it down. Bouncing the stick off the bottom side of your wrist works the best for me. As well with not having an actual rebound, this stresses your sticking accuracy. I would not recommend this for the first time player who wants to learn to play the drums. I find this to be more suitable for the pre-experienced. I can say after jamming for hours on this, I went to meet up with an buddy and played his real drum set, I found my self sort of incorporating my technique on the aerodrums on the real kit. I found to have slightly improved my RLRLRLRL rolls. I'd say this Is great for people in my living situation. The samples are excellent and the dynamics of the drums is awesome. Working with the sensitivities and drum volumes for a while I've got it set up just right for me. This is not a plug and play type deal, this will require some time to setup for your play style, my favorite feature is the ability to build your own kit, this kit certainly gets the job done for me and also satisfys my cravings to sit down and jam.
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Better Than Expected!
by Nate Frueh (5 out of 5 stars)
May 25, 2015

I'll make this a bit longer since it's such a new idea (relatively new, I guess I'm somewhat late to the party). Been playing with this for about a month so I have a good idea of what I like/don't like about it.

It is a little bit tricky to start using, but once you get the hang of it, it's very good. The idea behind it is that it tracks height of the drum sticks when it stops falling (i.e., lowest point of the drum stroke) and the horizontal position of the drumstick across the screen to map a 3d drum set onto a 2-d video image. Interesting, and seemingly gimmicky, but it works, and it works pretty darn well. Of course, the biggest selling point is how portable it is. I used to march percussion and know how important it is to practice on-the-go.

Some things I don't have a ton of experience with, but can talk about are the accuracy and latency. I can't say I've had the most experience with a real drum set, but I knew very quickly that my time literally air-drumming had caused me to develop some bad habits (i.e., I knew the motions of drumming, but had no accuracy when starting out). This would result in a lot of unintended cross-talk, as well as hitting the wrong drums because I wasn't used to hitting a drum in one spot consistently. This is something I learned fairly quickly, and the program did well to recreate a real, static drum set in this case.

I'm a musician and play the bass (rhythm-intensive) so I can feel when something has even the slightest bit of latency. When this program says 2.5ms latency, they mean it. It's amazing. However, in order to reach these levels of latency, you do have to set this program as the only one using the audio output, meaning you can't also playback music from your default music player. Of course, Aerodrums includes a built-in music player (which is a bit clunky, but that may change with a later software update), and I've decided to output my Aerodrums and phone (as the music source) to a mini mixer (Behringer Xenyx 502 is perfect for this). Aerodrums also lets you record audio, both as an inclusive .wav file and as a multi-track output (a .wav file for each drum/instrument).

Overall, I'm pleasantly surprised. I was expecting something that would only work half the time and I would probably end up selling or returning due to it being too gimmicky, but once you understand how exactly it works and what you have to do to get the most accurate drumming experience (which doesn't take much, just a bit of patience and willingness to reconfigure the drum layout) it can become a great way to create realistic sounding drum tracks. Looking for maybe an updated UI in later releases, as well as an ability to simulate brushes and cymbal choking (two things I thought I heard the guys behind Aerodrums were hoping to implement in the future).
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LOVE THEM! Love them! LOVE THEM!
by Jeremy (5 out of 5 stars)
January 12, 2015

I'll start by saying I have never ever written a review for a product ever on amazon. And also, I know companies sometimes have their"friends" write their reviews to help out. I have no affiliation with AERODRUMS at all. Just saw the ad and bought them......and they are AWESOME AMAZING!!! so very cool. The main thing is this, I wanted them to of course work and be as cool as they seemed on the video and THEY ARE BETTER than the video! No complaints at all!,Love them. Our band incorporated them into our show and the crowd went nuts. Very cool stuff. Get your kit today!
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Save your money.
by Amazon Customer (1 out of 5 stars)
June 4, 2019

I'm not giving this review because I hate this product but it just never worked correctly. I am a bigger guy tall. So I never really fit in screen and when I did the camera was so far away it couldnt really see me.

The computer I had was the bar minimum requirements and it was lagging horribly.

Got a faster computer and it still failed.

The light I had on the camera cracked due to heat.

The mallet fell apart.

I really wanted to like this product. I have now had it for 2 3 years only used it 5 6 times.
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I love combining the two when I can
by Marc Selwan (5 out of 5 stars)
November 20, 2015

I'm a gadget nerd and a musician. I love combining the two when I can. This product is great fun and is honestly quite amazing how tell this works. Please note you will need a PS3 Eye Camera to make this work. You can get one at a local Gamestop for about $10 (check to make sure yours has one in stock first).

Tracking and latency is great and the including software sounds and works well. Are you going to professional record and track midi with this? Probably not, but it's still a lot of fun.

Please also note that you will need a good bit of space to make this work. You also need to be in a room where you can control the amount of natural light coming in.

If you're looking for that fun, nerdy gadget for your musical instrument collection, you can't go wrong with it.
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Its a great buy, glad I decided to get them
by Carla (5 out of 5 stars)
March 2, 2018

I couldn't get it at first, but I kept working with it. Now I can practice at 2 in the morning if I want to. My drum teacher will be proud with all the practice I can do now. I have to get some wireless headphones the ones I have ,the cord is not long enough to reach for chair to computer. Its a great buy ,glad I decided to get them.

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